In order to optimize your Site Map, it might first be a good idea to understand what it is. A site map is a list of pages that a website contains all on one page (similar to a local directory) that is easily accessible to both search engine crawlers and users. It can be either a document file or a webpage that has a link to every page on the website, and having one helps visitors and crawlers find pages on the site.
Site maps are a great tool for making search engines crawl through your website in a much more efficient manner, thus helping index all of your pages faster and getting you more traffic, FASTER! All major websites have them, and when a search engine crawler visits it and sees all the links within that website it gives the search engine the «green light» to start crawling them. Just like a geographical map, a site map helps the user find where they're going. Check out Google's to get the general idea. Google's is pretty elaborate, chances are your site map will be much more simple, especially your first.
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Before designing yours, keep this in mind:
– Possibly the most important thing to remember: you need to link it to your Homepage. After all, if there is no link to it, it can't be crawled. This would make your efforts completely pointless. Ideally, you should have a link to your site map on every page of your website, but if this is inconvenient to you, or you simply prefer not to for what ever reason just be sure that you at least include one on your homepage.
– Search engine bots sometimes have difficulty with JavaScript and other specialty codes, so keep it simple and use plain text links. This will ensure that all search engines can access and accurately read your site maps.
– To make your site map more human friendly you should consider using Categories to further organize your links and make them easier to locate. There is no positive evidence stating that this is a necessary step to an effective SEO campaign, but if you wanted to be nice and make things easier on your viewer's I'm sure they would appreciate it.
– It's not a bad idea to add some brief descriptions to each link possible to not only further help the reader but also to keep the search engines from thinking it's just another page full of links (to be ignored).
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– Be sure to include the title in your Anchor Text, or link text, of your links. This is a great way to increase your link popularity!