By Halstatt Pires
Have you ever visited a web site and noticed the "Site Map"button jammed somewhere near the bottom of the page? Ever clickon it? Probably not. So, why do sites have site maps?
The Site Map – Very Important
In the old days of the net [about three years ago], expertsproclaimed every site should have a site map. From their ivorytower, they proclaimed the site map as the extraordinary methodto assure potential customers could easily navigate the site andfind what they needed. Once they found it, they would buy it andyou would be rich, rich, rich!
As is typical with such universally accepted proclamations, thisone was wrong. Anyone remotely paying attention to serverstatistics realized very few people were visiting site maps. Theproclamation stopped being shouted and evolved into criticismsof sites which still have site maps. These criticisms, ofcourse, also miss the mark.
HTML site maps are archaic. Visitors to your site will almostnever use them. You may even forget you have one. You willcertainly forget to update it as often as you should. Still, thesite map is a critical component of the site.
The first thing to realize is there is a specific purpose forhaving a site map. The purpose is to make it is as simple aspossible for search engine robots to crawl your site. The morepages indexed by the search engines, the better off you are.
To create a site map, just make a page with the meta tag of"site map". Add hyperlinked text to each fulcrum page of thesite. A fulcrum page is simply a gateway page to a particularsection of the site. For example, you may have a centralizedarticle page with links to each article. The centralized articlepage is a fulcrum page and should be included on the site map.Once completed, make sure that every page you want included inthe search engine has a hyperlinked text headline on at leastone of the fulcrum pages.
A quick word about Google. Google has a new xml feature you canuse for a site map. You can use it or forgo it as you see fit.Still, make sure to make an html site map for the other searchengines.
Once you have the site map page up, don’t wait for the searchengine robots to find it. Publish the link in an article bylineor blog as soon as possible. Within a week or so, you should seepages from your site being added to the search engine indexes.This is true for Google even if you don’t use the xml site maptool
Article Source: www.ArticlesBase.com
