Benefits of a Good Site Map

As a website grows larger and more complex, it becomes easier for visitors and search engine spiders to get lost. As the webmaster and website designer, it's your job to help them out by providing a good, usable site map.

A Good Site Map Will Give You Three Major Benefits:

  - Site Maps improve visitor usability.
A site map can improve the usefulness of your website by making it easier for more people to find the information that they are looking for.

No matter how carefully you design the navigation or how clearly you label the links some people will still get lost. A well-designed site map can 'save' that surfer and keep them on-site longer.

  - Site Maps improve search engine indexing.
A site map helps a spider find all of your pages, regardless of any other link-trail that they would otherwise have to follow, and despite the link types that they have trouble following.

A good site map is full of what a spider loves: static text and keywords combined with links - using keywords that are relevant to the destination page.

  - Site Maps improve accessibility for the disabled.
A site map also helps people who are using "assistive technologies" like web page readers or screen readers who have difficulty following non-text links - the type of links that are often found in dynamic menus, scripts, or in image maps.

The same goes for anyone who is surfing with images and/or scripts disabled, or who are using PDAs, phones or other such devices.

What Makes An Effective Site Map?

According to Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox column on Site Map Usability, a good site map is easy to find and simple to use.

That column is old - 2002 - but the points made are still valid:

At the time of the study, less than half of the websites offered a site map, and those that did often buried them deep inside their sites. Only 27% of users in his study turned to a site map when they had trouble finding something, and that a lot of people are unaware of the site maps on sites they visited.

The point to take away from this is simple - Make the link to your site map obvious and put it on every page of your website. If it isn't obvious and clearly labeled as a site map, people can't use it. As Neilsen says:

"Users won't search out the site map on their own. Forcing them to navigate to a navigation aid when they are lost adds insult to injury. Thus, we strongly recommend having a clear link to the site map on every page. Call the link Site Map. This label worked well in our study, and is the one used by 63% of sites with site maps."

Good Site Maps Have Some Common Characteristics:

  They give a quick visual overview of the entire website and require very little scrolling to see the entire map.

  The map is linked from every page, with a text link that clearly indicates it is a map of the website.

  They use static text links, often with keyword-loaded descriptions, that point to every page on the website.

  They use 'standard' colors for visited and un-visited links to show visitors what pages they've already visited.

  They Do Not use a dynamic menu that expands in response to user actions.

  They Are Not fancy or edgy or 'cutting edge' in any way. They are clear, concise, and easy to use.

To quote again from the above-mentioned column:

"As we have found again and again, users hated non-standard user interfaces that forced them to learn a special way of doing things for the sake of a single website. Site maps should be simple, compact layouts of links, and they should show everything in a single view."

Building Your Site Map

I can't get into details about how to build your site map - there are simply too many variables depending on what editor you're using, your template & theme, your host and how big your website is.

There are tools and services listed below that can extract and write your site map with a little effort on your part, or you may want to simply take your navigation menu or directory structure and go from there with your HTML editor and page template.

Personally, I prefer the template & editor approach... But I realize that not everyone is a control freak like me. So here are a few tools that may help you out.

Tools & Services That Can Help.

Best: SiteMap XML from softswot.com includes the new Sitemaps Protocol standard supported by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other major search engines. Use it to generate a Static site map for free.

Good: AllWebMenus has a free tool that allows you to create site maps in HTML format, with ready-made templates, or you can simply edit the file to match the look and feel of your template.

Offsite: FreeFind has a decent free site map utility as part of their free site-search service. It automatically generates a site map, and automatically updates it each time your site changes. The drawback is that it is hosted on their server.

PHP: iG Site Map Generator is a freeware PHP script that can be included in any other script, or can be used alone like an html generator or site map viewer.

Site Map Styles & Layouts

A site map that mirrors the website look and feel can reduce the users feeling of being lost during navigation. It can also help them to intuitively understand the organization of your website, helping them search for information quickly and accurately.

The Multiple Column list is the 'classic' static HTML site map. This style gives a simple site map without any dynamic elements and can most easily be integrated into your website design.
 Example of Multiple Column Style

The Index style often shows users an alphabetical index of a web site, and is usually divided into multiple pages.
 Example of Index Style

Then there is the DMOZ-style portal interface layout, where the user follows a series of links to the final page. Not really recommended, but some software generates this type of layout automatically.
 Example of Portal Style

Wrapping Up

Whatever method you use to build your site map, and whatever final structure it has, the main things to keep in mind are:
  - It must be easy for your visitors to find and use.
  - It should help search engines find all of your pages.

Building a good site map may not be an easy task, but it's not all that hard, either. I do believe that once it's done you'll be glad you made the effort.

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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