A site map is a textual (using links) depiction of the structure of the website through which a visitor to the website can navigate to any part or area of the website. From the SEO stand point, the sitemap can be viewed as a series of internal links within the website from the home page following a hierarchical path to the secondary and tertiary levels of the website. Site maps are important for SEO since they are used as highways by the spiders and bots for reaching different areas of the website. Keep in mind the following important points while designing a site map for your site.
Sitemap Creation and Sitemap Advantages
Create the site map in the form of an HTML webpage using text hyperlinks to depict the different pages of the website. Don’t use Javascript in the site map as bots find simple HTML tags easier to read.
Include all or major areas of your site in the site map depending upon how many links will fall within the site map. Include pages and areas of the site that you think should be indexed by the search engine spiders.
Don’t create an only graphics site map or a site map that contains no other text apart from the links constituting the site map. Always add some other text (such as a small description of how to use the site map) within the page to prevent the search engines from viewing the page as spam. Do not add more than 70-80 links on the sitemap, since many search engines stop indexing links beyond a certain number.
Use keywords in the site map for displaying the text link. The keyword should match the keyword included in the page being linked to from the sitemap.
Try to place the site map on all important pages of the website including the homepage so that it can be easily detected by the search engines and more Google Pagerank can flow to the sitemap.
If your site has more than three levels i.e. homepage plus two more levels, you will find it hard to get the 3rd level onwards indexed in the search engines. You can use sitemaps by including these sub level pages within the map.This way you can get such pages indexed much quicker. The search engine bots will index the site map from top to bottom
Should you Use Image Maps?
No, search engines are rarely able to read links within image maps. If using image maps is an essential design requirement of the website then it is also essential that the links within the image map are also placed as text links somewhere else on the page so that they get properly indexed.
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