5. Why Sitemaps are Baby Food For Search Engines
Just a few years ago, the philosophy about sitemaps went something like this:
If your customers need to use a sitemap to find their way around your website, you
haven't done your job organizing your content and creating a navigational system
that is easy to understand.
But sitemaps are now back in favor. Why? It's less about human visitors and more
about search engines.
What is a sitemap? A sitemap is page that lists all of the other pages on your
site, usually in a bulleted list.
Here's an example of a sitemap:
Click the graphic above to see a live sample of a sitemap page.
As I've discussed before, search engines are easily confused. Many pages of a
website are often 'hidden' behind tricky menus or drop-down lists. Or, the links
to reach a specific page are too deep (i.e. more than a couple of pages down from
the home page).
A sitemap, linked from the home page of the site, will list every page of your
site in one convenient place.
When a search engine visits your site map, it's very easy for them to then get
a list of every page on your site, and then crawl, digest and include all of your
content in their system.
We generally recommend having the link to your sitemap on the bottom footer navigation
of your site.
Click the graphic above to see a live sample sitemap link.
But you need to make sure that as your site changes, your sitemap is updated.
Otherwise, Google and others may not index the latest pages placed on your site.
Our PageDirector system, for example, automatically updates the sitemap each time
a page is added, or the name of a page is changed.
And even better than an HTML sitemap is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a sitemap
that is specifically formatted for search engines like Google. It's a machine-readable
version that allows you to specify all of the pages of the site.
Click the graphic above to see a live sample of an XML sitemap.
Adding an XML sitemap ensures that a site will get indexed much more quickly and
more rapidly than not using this method at all.
For the new site, God
in the Wilderness.com, (a site devoted to my wife's book that will be published
by Random House's DoubleDay Religion on April 8, 2008), the XML sitemap allowed
the site to be indexed in 3-4 days vs. the usual 3-4 months. (But then again, it's
my wife... so of course she gets all of the top-shelf website development stuff.)
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