October 9, 2006 Sitemaps are becoming ever important to a website’s success. Generally speaking, a sitemap is just that, a map of your site. Today I will shed a bit of light on what a sitemap is for, and what it should include. At a minimum, your sitemap should link to ever major page or section on your site, but preferably an all inclusive link list. This can get quite large, and a page with too many links can make a search engine crawler waiver just a bit, so keep the sitemap to a maximum of about 150 links. It serves 2 purposes really. One, for those surfers that prefer to navigate your site from one page. And two, recently really, for a search engine to better crawl your site. The larger your site gets, the more cumbersome the flow of navigation can become. If you have thousands of pages, it’s hard for a visitor to get to a specific page from the home page. The web savvy surfer knows to look for a sitemap link, so as to browse for the proper section he or she may be looking for. For ease of use, there should be link to the sitemap on every page of your site.
When a crawler gets to your sitemap, it has a very easy time of getting to the other pages. So again, it’s best to have a link to every page on your sitemap. You will also want to make sure that the sitemap is crawler friendly in regards to simple code and preventing the robots.txt file from stopping the crawler. Google helps in a very cool fashion, by providing their own Google Sitemap. This is a neat tool that not only creates a sitemap, but will also allow for Google to give an amount of feedback clueing you in on guidelines that may not be met by your site. This will help in understanding why a page may not be indexed and sometimes ranking. It does require a bit of finesse as the sitemap tool is an XML based product, so try to be careful if you’re not experienced. In respect to coding as a whole, it’s really pretty simple, and the manual makes it almost dummy proof.
You don’t need to have Google’s Sitemap if you don’t feel up to it. Just as long as you have a page dedicated to being a sitemap, you can submit that to the se’s and be OK. Just keep with Google’s, Yahoo!’s, and MSN’s guidelines during the creation, and be sure to name the page sitemap.html. If you do decide to go with the Google Sitemap, you can visit their official blog and group for specific help.
A small disclaimer if I may. Having a good sitemap does not mean that you will rank higher. It only means that a search engine can crawl easier, and makes submissions a little quicker. There is a small debate on this, but no proof to show a difference.
If you have any questions, same as always. Let me know.
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