|
The_Site_Map_ _Important_or_Not
| The Site Map - Important or Not?
Have you ever visited a web site and noticed the "Site Map"
button jammed somewhere near the bottom of the page? Ever click
on it? Probably not. So, why do sites have site maps?
The Site Map – Very Important
In the old days of the net [about three years ago], experts
proclaimed every site should have a site map. From their ivory
tower, they proclaimed the site map as the extraordinary method
to assure potential customers could easily navigate the site and
find what they needed. Once they found it, they would buy it and
you would be rich, rich, rich!
As is typical with such universally accepted proclamations, this
one was wrong. Anyone remotely paying attention to server
statistics realized very few people were visiting site maps. The
proclamation stopped being shouted and evolved into criticisms
of sites which still have site maps. These criticisms, of
course, also miss the mark.
HTML site maps are archaic. Visitors to your site will almost
never use them. You may even forget you have one. You will
certainly forget to update it as often as you should. Still, the
site map is a critical component of the site.
The first thing to realize is there is a specific purpose for
having a site map. The purpose is to make it is as simple as
possible for search engine robots to crawl your site. The more
pages indexed by the search engines, the better off you are.
To create a site map, just make a page with the meta tag of
"site map". Add hyperlinked text to each fulcrum page of the
site. A fulcrum page is simply a gateway page to a particular
section of the site. For example, you may have a centralized
article page with links to each article. The centralized article
page is a fulcrum page and should be included on the site map.
Once completed, make sure that every page you want included in
the search engine has a hyperlinked text headline on at least
one of the fulcrum pages.
A quick word about Google. Google has a new xml feature you can
use for a site map. You can use it or forgo it as you see fit.
Still, make sure to make an html site map for the other search
engines.
Once you have the site map page up, don’t wait for the search
engine robots to find it. Publish the link in an article byline
or blog as soon as possible. Within a week or so, you should see
pages from your site being added to the search engine indexes.
This is true for Google even if you don’t use the xml site map
tool.
About the author:
Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with
http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing company in
San Diego.
|
|
| |
| |
