Sitemaps: An Helping Hand To Search Engine Spiders

One of the important components of search engine optimization is the use of sitemaps. If you want your visitors and search engine spiders to find every page on your web site, a sitemap can be your biggest help especially if you have a lot of content on your site.

So, what is a sitemap? Basically, it is a navigation tool. It lets visitors know what are the pages you have on your site, how they are organized, where they are located, and how to get to those pages with the least number of clicks possible. A good sitemap is more than a hyperlinked index, it also provides the user with a list of alphabetically arranged titles.

Sitemaps can provide lots of useful information for search engine robots that crawl your site and eventually index it. Once the robot gets to the sitemap, it can visit every page on your entire site because all the information is clearly indicated on that one page. However, in order for your sitemap to work most effectively, you must include a link to your sitemap in the navigation links on every page of your site.

To make your sitemap most appealing to both the search engine robots and human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. You should try to use your targeted keywords in the description text of each link. Remember not to be too repetitive with your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized.

When you make it easy for people to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for and will most likely be a repeat visitor. Likewise, when your web pages can be easily found by search engine spiders, you increase your chances of having all your pages being listed in their search results.

So, if creating a sitemap isn’t part of your current search engine optimization strategy, maybe it’s time you thought about adding this beneficial and yet fairly simple tool to your site.