How Sitemaps Can Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

The structure of your website plays a key role in obtaining search engine rankings. If your website structure is too complex, the search engines may not be able to find the pages you want ranked. Fortunately, there exists a sitemap strategy that will provide an open door to search engines for just about any website, ultimately increasing your odds for ranking success. The strategy is to provide a standard sitemap web page as well as a search engine sitemap to glean the benefits of both applications.

Step 1: Create a Sitemap Web Page

The purpose of a sitemap is to provide visitors with an alternative and perhaps faster method of finding a specific page or section within your website. The secondary purpose is to provide a single page where a search engine can reach every page within your website. Here are some considerations when creating or optimizing your website's sitemap for best results:

1. Begin creating the sitemap with a link to the home page and then work your way down listing the links to each of the main sections of your website.
2. Next, under each main section create another tier to list the links from that page to further pages deeper within the section. Ultimately, the sitemap will end up looking like a book's table of contents.
3. Once you have created this link-based table of contents, go back to the top of the page and then convert each link into text links using the title of the linked page (or good page-descriptive text). For example, on the home page you would add the title tag and then make those words into a link to the home page. Do this for all links on the page.
4. Once the sitemap is complete, add a link to it from the footer of every page within your website.

Congratulations, now you have an effective sitemap which will allow visitors and search engines alike to find pages deep within your website.

Step 2: Create a Sitemap Specifically for Search Engines

A search engine sitemap (meant only for search engines to see) is a tool provided by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN to allow webmasters to suggest how often, and in what order, a search engine should spider each page within their websites.
Creating a search engine sitemap is quite simple thanks to a free online tool at XML-Sitemaps.com that will automatically spider your website and create the sitemap for you. They offer up to 500 webpages maximum  spidered for free. More than 500 webpages is $14.95 for the standalone version. The site even provides step-by-step instructions on how to add the sitemap to your website. I am not going to cover the specifics of creating a search engine sitemap here because it may be technical enough that you should have your webmaster handle it for you. If, however, you want to handle this yourself, it is explained well at the above URL. Once the sitemap is complete, there are further instructions on the website on how to submit the sitemap to the search engines for spidering.

Conclusion

So why do I recommend having two kinds of sitemaps? The first sitemap you created added a beneficial resource for your site visitors as well as the search engines. It also provided the additional benefit of adding keyword weight to the linked pages.
The search engine sitemap provides you with the knowledge that the search engines know, without a doubt, which pages you want them to add to their databases, how often, and in what order -- a most comforting fact.

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