I’m convinced that from now on, all the sites I build need to have sitemaps. If they’re built in ZenCart, or CMS Made Simple, that’s not a problem, they build the sitemaps for me. But for all other sites, it’s another page to make and link to. I just added one to my own site after 8 years in the business, so it’s not something I’ve always done. But better late than never. 

Why sitemaps? I think the two big reasons are:

1. Usability
2. Search Engine Optimization

Usability: Making Your Site More User-Friendly

 For usability, it’s a matter of making sure it’s easy to find all the content your site has to offer. I try to make the navigation logical and accessible, but I can’t assume anymore that people will follow the steps through the site that I’ve laid out. Or that they want to. It’s got to be quick and easy. By showing users a bulleted list of pages, they have to option to quickly scan and find the page they want. Or discover pages they didn’t know existed, because they never thought to go through “About Us” to find testimonials, for example. This assumes that your sitemap has logical and easy to understand titles for each page. You could add a description next to each item, but the overall idea of sitemaps is to keep them quick and simple.

Search Engines Love Them

The robot crawlers behind the search engines love content. And following links. So why not make it easy for them? A nice, text-based list of pages in your site is just begging to be found. And those web crawlers will follow each link from your sitemap, goobling up content as they go. Google not only loves sitemaps, but asks that you build a special one just for them. A Google Sitemap is an XML document that follows the conventions laid out by the sitemap Powers that Be at sitemaps.org, with each page in your site listed in a specially-marked up document, highlighting not only the page title, but things like how important the page is, and how often it is updated. This tells the search engine how to rank pages of equal content from your site, and how often to come back and look for updates. Not rules, just suggestions. And it can’t hurt to try.This means you should have 2 sitemaps files to every site. The one for people, sitemap.html, and one for the robots, sitemap.xml.

Not a Coder? Tools That Build Sitemaps For You

While I can easily build a sitemap for my clients, if you’re wanting to build your own, there’s some technical details to consider. Building a HTML sitemap designed for site users (aka “people) isn’t hard. You can build one in an program like Dreamweaver by making a bullet list and linking each item to appropriate page, like I did on my site.But building the sitemap the search engine webcrawlers prefer, an XML document? That requires a bit of coding knowlege. Google shares how to do this online, and you can use a simple text editor to make your sitemap.xml. You can cut and paste their examples, rewording the pages and links to suit your site.There are also 3rd party tools that will generate the XML code for you. One choice can be downloaded for free, at SourceForge. A simple Google search will reveal a host of options for building the sitemap.xml file, such as www.xml-sitemaps.com.And as you search for tools and information, it leads me to the next point that accompanies the importance of sitemaps. Can you guess what it is?

The Importance of Search

While sitemaps are great, an equally valuable tool to add to your site, if not more valuable, is SEARCH. Search is by far the preferred method of finding content on the Internet. More on adding search to your site in the next post.

Although this was written for webmasters such as myself, I think anyone interested in better search results would do well to read what Google has to say about building search engine friendly website.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. SEO is something I consider with each website I build, but to be truly successful at being found on the search engines requires your ongoing help (”you,” meaning the site owner).

You could hire a SEO professional to do the work for you. But assuming you don’t want to spend that kind of money right away, there are some simple steps we can take to help your site out.

I found a great article that summarizes a basic strategy for improving search engine results. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Google publishes a list of search terms gaining in popularity each week. It’s a good snapshot of what’s a hot topic right now, and it seems to work independently of the major news headlines. Some of it is irrelevant, but some are interesting.