For those that do not already know, a site map is basically an additional page on your website that incorporates a list of links to every single page on your site. Site maps can be used on websites of any size however if your website has more than 16 pages, implementing a site map is essential to improve your user’s experience (usability) and the effectiveness of search engine optimisation.
Although not always necessary to include in your main website navigation, a link to your site map should be easily located in a standard position on every page of your website.
UsabilityHow many times have you been surfing through a large website and found yourself lost deep within the pages, a little confused about your location? Have you ever found yourself on a large website that you know contains the information you are looking for but cannot seem to make any sense of the navigation to find it?
These are two perfect examples of where a site map is useful. In either scenario regardless of where the user is on the website they can simply click on the ‘site map’ link and view an informative list of every single page on the website making it easy to find exactly what they are looking for.
Search Engine OptimisationSite Maps are a necessity when it comes to implementing
search engine optimization on large websites. Although adding a site map to a website will not directly increase your rankings it does help in the following ways:
A site map gives search engine spiders or robots a point of reference with links to all pages on the site, enabling them to spider and index your entire website quickly and easily. Without a site map, pages that are buried more than 1-2 clicks from the home page will take a long time to get indexed (if at all) which in turn will result in delayed ranking increases.
Keeping usability in mind, all links on your site map can contain target key phrases which will count as an additional vote on the importance of those pages and boost the pages’ search engine rankings.
When it comes to increasing your rankings, the larger your website is the better. Logically, this is because the 3 major search engines see large websites as more informative and useful to users. By adding a site map, although only 1 page, you are increasing the size of your website which in turn will help boost your rankings.
Something to keep in mind when creating a site map for an extremely large site is that Google will not follow any more than 100 links on any one page. To get around this ROI.com.au would suggest splitting your site map up over a number of separate pages.
