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Your Website's Site Map
A site map is as exactly as it sounds -- it is an organized map of a website, preferably in textual form. Its purpose is two-fold, to help website users find information quickly and to aid in search engine optimization, or optimizing your website's appearance in search engine results. A site map is simple, yet a necessary component of every website. One goal of a site map is to make information more readily available to your site users, so you do not want to design a map that is more complex than your actual website. We recommend, in an obvious place, including a link on your website's homepage called "Site Map." This is the best way to point out the map to your site's visitors. It should be structured in an outline fashion and so that each web page is linked from the site map. There should also be some indication to the user as to what pages they have already viewed. The most effective way of accomplishing this is through the use of standard blue links that turn purple if they have already been clicked on. The other, and not as commonly known, reason for including a site map on your website is that it ensures every page of your site is scanned or crawled for search engine listings. Spiders and crawlers are programs that submit web pages to search engines. Site maps are necessary in assisting spiders and crawlers in indexing the site to increase appearance in search engine results. Oftentimes, a spider or crawler will visit a site's homepage and scan the content on that page and any page that is directly linked or two direct clicks away from the homepage. Because of this, a great deal of a site's content can be left out of search engine listings even if the pages are rich in relevant content, solely because the pages are too many clicks away for the programs to scan. An easy solution to this problem is to create a site map that is linked from the homepage. Then, every page on the site is two clicks away from the homepage -- one click for the site map itself and one more click for each web page. If you would like help creating a site map for your website or need your website audited based on other design and marketing principles, please contact Rick at NPAdvisors at mailto:Rick@npadvisors.com. December 2003 | |
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