Sitemaps are Important!
In our last Internet marketing clinic session, a question came up about site maps.
There are two kinds of site maps, and they are both important tools to achieve better rankings for your site. One is a sitemap constructed as a page on your site. This is visible to the site users, and is a convenience for them, as well as a good tool for helping search engines to find the pages on your site. Because is is for site users, it should reflect some logical order to browsing your site.
When building it, you need to think about who is using your site and what they might be interested in seeing. You want to make it easy for them to find the information they are interested in. Because it is for readers, it may not include a link to every page on your site. That could become overwhelming for users and defeat an important purpose of the page. At the least, it should include a direct link to every major page on your site.
The second kind of sitemap is specifically for search engines, and the rules for it are different. It will definitely include a link to every page on your site, no matter how big your site is. For sites over 50,000 pages, this map has to be handled differently, but most sites for small businesses need not be concerned with this issue. A definition of sitemaps and good discussion of them is available on Wikipedia.
My class notes for the evening provide more information and a link to some software for creating a sitemap for your site.
This protocol for creating and using sitemaps goes back to 2006 and has been adopted by the top major search engines, so it provides excellent coverage and should not be overlooked by any webmaster! One important point to keep in mind is that you should set up a pointer to your sitemap in your “robots.txt” file, which all search engines look at. The sitemap won’t help you if the search engines don’t find it!