Building a website and putting it up online is comparatively easier nowadays. However, deriving more people to the website and getting it indexed on popular search engines is a methodological task. One of the aids for getting webpages indexed is putting a sitemap on the website.

A sitemap is a web page which lists all the pages of a website in an organized manner, preferably showing navigation paths or hierarchy. These listed pages are basically web-links present on that website and help the users, webmasters and the search engines to index a website. Sitemap helps the users to navigate through the website and helps search engines to find all website links present. Building an ideal sitemap is a lot like building a perfect website. In other words, we can say that a sitemap is the pseudo-index for a website.

Though Sitemap helps the crawlers to find the web pages of a website, it does not guarantee indexing of a web site on search engines. Still, it does ensure that a search engine spider will more likely index the website properly instead of doing it partially.

When creating a sitemap, one should keep the following points in mind:

• A sitemap should be the simplest page of the website – it reflects the constituents.
• One should not give a complicated name to the sitemap link and keep it as “Sitemap”. This will help visitors to understand immediately what it means and is for.
• Avoid dynamic sitemaps; in which visitors have to work to detect information, because the visitors come to a sitemap for comfort and finding their way around the site.
• All pages linked to the sitemap should be organized. It may be a good idea to put a sentence describing the page contents below the link and keywords may also be included in the title attribute of the anchor tag.
• A sitemap link should be included with other links on the main menu on a website.
• All pages of a website should carry a sitemap link.

One can also use an XML Sitemap Generator tool to generate a perfect XML sitemap, which is for the Search Engine robots specifically (The one being talked about above is an HTML Sitemap – for the visitors and the search engines).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Website Evaluation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.