Improve Your SEO With a Better Site Map

A site map is just a web page, or a set of pages, that list all of the pages on your website. Visitors go to site maps if they are lost or looking for specific details on a crowded website. A site map's main job is to give the visitor a quick overview of all website sections in a single glance.

Search engine spiders regularly crawl the pages they already have listed. When they find a new link, they rush over and check it out then run home to tell daddy all about it.

What does all that have to do with a site map?

Site maps are not just a way to quickly lead a spider to your inner pages: A well-designed site map can increase the usability and page rank for your entire website.

Let's say you have a fairly new website with 50 pages... It is listed in the search results, but they only have 10 pages listed. Chances are that they aren't ignoring the other 40 pages, they probably just haven't found them yet.

Finding and indexing all the pages on a website takes time, and the amount of time it takes is directly related to how "deep" the spiders have to go to reach all the pages. If your website does not use a site map then it can take longer for the spiders to crawl the entire website.

For illustration:
If page 1 links to page 2, and
page 2 links to page 3, and
page 3 links to page 4, and
page 4 links to page 5, and
page 5 links to page 6...

A spider can start crawling from any page that it already knows about, but it may only go two levels deep on each visit. In the above illustration, a spider will have to follow links six levels deep to find all your pages. So it will have to visit two or three times to reach the sixth level, and that may take two or three months.

Now consider this example:
Page 1 links to page 2
   ...and links to page 3
   ...and links to page 4
   ...and links to page 5
   ...and links to page 6

This structure has links to all pages right from page 1. The spider comes along and can crawl every page in just one visit. This method can get all of your pages included in the search results a lot sooner than the other method.

However, this structure is impractical for websites larger than a few dozen pages, so that's where a site map becomes important. From the site map, a spider can find and crawl every single page of your website.

If your website has under 100 pages, and if your site map is well structured, one visit may be all it needs to find every page.

If your website has several hundred pages, or several thousand, then a different structure for your site map is required.

Why?

Because a spider will only follow a certain number of links on a page. There are differing opinions about how many it will follow on a visit, but the general consensus is that 100 links on a page is about the limit.

So what does that do to your site map? Well, if your website has 90 pages, no problem. But let's say your website has 500 pages... then you should build your site map in sections. You'll have your home page and your 'main' site map, both of which you can link to however many 'Mini-Maps' that you need to cover all your pages.

To Illustrate:
[level 1] The home page on a website, it has links to:
[level 2] - Important pages, main site map and the mini-maps
- The site map and the mini-maps themselves link to:
[level 3] - All other pages on your website.

In this structure, no pages are more than three levels away from the home page. At most, it will take the spiders two visits to find and index all the pages on your website.

Site Map SEO & Usability

While it's true that a site map is only a list of links, there are a few things you can do to add usability for visitors, (yes, real people do use site maps) and also some optimization for the search engines as well.

The main thing is just add a description of the target page to each link. Visitors can use the site map as an alternate nav menu, and the keywords you put in the anchor text and descriptions will give the spiders something to index - you may even get some decent pagerank for a site map that is so user-friendly.

To illustrate: What is better - for visitors and spiders ?
Green Boxes
or
Green Boxes for Green Widgets, keep your green widgets organized with our high-quality green boxes.

You can easily take that to the next level and make your mini-maps into user-friendly sub-directories...

Simply categorize the mini-maps by theme or topic, so all related pages or products are grouped together and linked from one place. With helpful link descriptions like the example above, a visitor can quickly and easily find whatever they are looking for.

Note -- Give your mini-maps even more spider food by adding relevant page titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords, page headers and a paragraph of introductory text. Then search engines will love the page and rank it well for the relevant keywords.

Let's Recap:

A website with less than 25 pages can get by without a site map, provided that all pages (that you want indexed) are linked from the main page.

A website with fewer than 100 pages can benefit from a dedicated one-page site map, provided that the map is both user-friendly and optimized for the search engines.

A website with hundreds (or thousands) of pages can get the most benefit from a set of smaller site maps... provided that they are linked from the home page, have fewer than 100 links each, are grouped by topic and are optimized for the search engines.

Tip -- there is no real need to name the mini-maps as 'Site Maps'... depending on your website theme, they can be called 'section directories', 'dinner recipes', 'product categories' or whatever works for your website.

However - the main site map should always be called a "Site Map" because that is what people expect to find on a website.

By designing the main site map as a visualization of the website structure, you can include several levels of hierarchy and the page can still be small enough that they can understand the website structure and quickly find what they want.

So you can see how site maps can be used as alternate navigation systems by visitors, as well as providing a source of healthy spider food for the hungry spiders.

Resources for Making Your Site Map

Unfortunately, site maps do take quite a bit of time to build. On a 2500 page website, it could take days to do a good job of it, and even a small site map can take many hours.

Personally, I prefer to do such things by myself and add new pages as I go along. But I am something of a control freak and I realize that not everyone is willing to take the time to do that.

So I went looking for scripts or software that will create a site map for you. I found three free ones (see below) but I should tell you that I haven't tested them so I can't say how well they work.

I also saw several programs that aren't free. I'm not about to buy something that I'll never use, so I can't talk about them and won't list them... just know that all you have to do is run a quick search for 'site map software' and you'll find them too.

To Your Success!
Tim

SiteMap XML V1.0 - generate a Static site map for your web site for free. Allows multiple Start Urls, so you can map unlinked areas of your site. Can extract links up to five levels deep when run on your server and link extract limits can be set from 10 to 5000. If you Register SiteMap XML (for $19.95) it can also be used to build real time Dynamic site maps that will always reflect the status of your site. (Win98,ME,3.x,NT4.x,2000,XP,2003,Mac OS X)

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

AllWebMenus site map builder - choose among ready-made templates for your site map or edit the HTML to match your website.

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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