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Article:
Sitemaps 101 - Back To SEO School by: Niall Roche Sitemaps are without doubt one of the most often ignored and undervalued aspects of search engine optimization. You've probably spent a huge amount of time working on pages of original content, keyword density and getting incoming links but never once spared a thought for a sitemap for your new creation. What is a sitemap? Put simply it's a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. This is useful on two levels: 1. Your visitor can quickly reference all the documents on your site to find exactly what they're looking for. 2. Search engine spiders can also quickly find and index every single page of your site in the least amount of time. The SEO benefits of using a sitemap far considerable and should not be ignored. This is a win-win situation for you, your website visitors and the search engines. Put simply you're nuts if you've not included a sitemap as part of your overall website promotion strategy. The good news is that it's never too late to start. You can create a sitemap page today but there are some rules to creating an effective sitemap that you need to follow: Your sitemap must only be linked to from your homepage and no other page. Why? You want the search engine spiders to find this link directly from your homepage and follow it from there. Your sitemap MUST NOT be linked to from every other page of your site. Also from a Google Pagerank point of view only linking to your sitemap from your homepage can also 'funnel' PR quickly to pages all over your site. If you have a large website of 50 pages or more limit the number of pages listed on your sitemap to a maximum of 30. This is to prevent your sitemap from being misinterpreted as a link farm by the search engines. It also makes the sitemap a lot easier for real human visitors to read through. Limiting the number of pages listed on each sitemap to 30 might mean splitting your sitemap over '5
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