Sitemaps and hypertext links are "food"
for search engine robots. We will look at the value of text
links for optimal spidering, and the importance of using a
sitemap in order to help search engine robots reach your website's
deeper pages.
Hypertext Links Search engine robots
are not terribly sophisticated. They cannot click a button,
submit a form, pull down a menu, or perform any other type
of online "user interaction" that might be used
by a human visitor. Robots are able to index the text on a
page and click through hypertext links. For this reason, adding
navigational text links to your web pages (often located at
the bottom of the page) provides the search engine robots
with another means to click through the links of your web
pages when it cannot access these other types of navigation.
No matter how great your JavaScript
menu system is, the search engine robots cannot use it. They
can follow "plain old" hyperlinks, and that's about
it. Since the ability to move around on your site is vital
to the robots' successful indexing of your content, you want
to make it as easy as possible for them to visit all of your
pages. Use of text links at the bottom of your pages, while
hardly cutting-edge, is one of the best
ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around
on your site. Be sure to include links to your site's principal
pages on all the pages in your site. Always remember to put
a link to your sitemap page here too.
Sitemaps A sitemap page is a supercharged
version of the bottom-of-the-page hypertext links. The sitemap
provides "food" for a hungry search engine robot.
A sitemap page will at very least have links to all of the
major pages on your site. Depending on the size of your site,
it may actually link to all of your pages. This means that
once the robot gets to the sitemap page, it can visit every
page on your entire site. Having all of the content of your
site included in the search engine database is a good thing:
you are much more likely to
come-up in the search engine results when somebody is performing
a search related to your topic.
A good sitemap will:
Provide text links to at least the most
important pages on your site; depending on the size of the
site, it may have links to every page
Give a short explanation of each page
on your site, to inform your visitors about your website
Give your visitors the information they
need when lost in your website, and show them how to reach
the page they are looking for
Provide a pathway for the search engine
robots to follow in order to reach your most important pages
Provide important keyword phrases in
the sitemap text and hypertext links that help the automated
search engine robot "understand" what the page is
about
Help search engine robots find static
landing pages that then link to dynamically generated pages
they may not otherwise find
Even if your website is small, add a
sitemap for your visitors and for the search engine robots.
To make your sitemap most attractive
to the search engine robots and your human visitors, be sure
to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links.
Use your keywords in that text, including appropriate content
for each of the pages to which you link. Be careful not to
overuse your keyword phrases,
though, or you may be penalized in the rankings. Remember
that this is a map that will be used by both search engine
robots and your human visitors. If the content of the page
makes sense to
the people who visit your site, chances are it will make sense
to the visiting robots as well.
When you make it easy for your visitors
to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking
for. When you make it easy to search engine robots to move
around on your site, you increase your chances of being favorably
listed in their search results.
About the author:
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant
for Search Innovation (www.searchinnovation.com),
a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses.
Besides running her own company, Daria is an associate of
WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company.
She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998,
including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for
O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.
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