Optimizing your website does not only mean improving the content and the keyword density of every page. You also have to include a sitemap, which is like the floor plan of your website. Opinions about sitemap optimization vary among experts, however, Techs4Success believes that if properly optimized, a sitemap can help search engine spiders crawl and index and eventually rank your website.
Experts say that when the number of pages in a site exceeds several hundred pages, it is not a good point to link every single page in a site map. Google suggests the number of pages to be within a hundred. Moreover, the simpler a sitemap is, the better its chance of getting indexed.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of pages on a website normally organized in a hierarchical form. It helps human readers and search engines to find every page in a website easily. It may also be in the form of a diagram that points out to a page in your website. However, a list of pages is a more popular structure. Sitemaps should provide details about pages with different topics but have similar subjects.
There are two types of sitemaps. The first type is an HTML page that helps human readers find their way in your website. The second type is an XML Sitemap (with the capital S) that helps search engine spiders recognize pages in your website. A Sitemap can provide information regarding frequency of site changes, when it was last updated and the importance and relatedness of all URLs in your site.
How to Optimize your Sitemap
- Use the keyword in the link that you set up for each page of your website, including the link that you will put in your sitemap.
- Search engines have trouble recognizing image maps, so you might want to include text links to describe your site map.
- Include creating simple text link to your site map from your homepage so the search engines can find it.
- Direct your visitors to your site map if you find a broken link or a missing page on your website.
