Help the spiders find their way with a site map

written by: Sandino Garcia; article published: year 2008, month 01;

In: Root » Internet » Search engines and SEO

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Many SEOs will tell you that a site map is important. You may be asking yourself, "Why? People never use sitemaps to navigae, and the spiders will naturally crawl all of my site anyway". That is true, over time all your pages will be indexed. And people don't want to read through a list of links to find a page they want (they'd rather use a search box). But what matters is WHEN your will be indexed. If your pages get indexed faster, they get more exposure sooner and the sooner you start making money. And this is exactly where site maps help.

Creating a sitemap is simple. First, make a plain, normal page, except you put "site map" as the meta tag. Then, add links to each main page of your site. Under each main page link, add links to subpages, then under the subpages, add the pages under it. Continue in this fashion until you have something that look like this:

Site Map

>Main Page 1
->Subpage 1
--->Page under Subpage 1
--->Another page under Subpage 1

->Subpage 2
--->Page under Subpage 2

and so on. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, you don't even have to design it. Just make sure it's a page with links to at least all the major pages of your site. You can even use plain old HTML. Note though that Google has a new tool that helps you create sitemaps using xml. You can use that too if you want.

Then, put a link to the sitemap somewhere prominent but not easily seen, like at the bottom of the page of your home page. Or link to it in a blog. Do this as soon as possible to get your site indexed faster.

For more information on SEO, visit SEO Solutions.

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