Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Sitemap: A little attention can do wonders

On several websites the sitemap pages remain unutilized. It is a very common trade of website owners and online marketers to overlook the importance and usability of site map pages. It is really annoying to see so little credit and attention is given to these pages in spite of its huge contribution in SEO of a website and its ability to provide an extremely convenient user experience.


Well, the SEO trends are now changing and webmasters and online marketers are focusing on utilizing every single tool that they consider to be worthwhile for marketing. With my long term experience as a SEO San Francisco, in this article I have given my view on sitemaps and what it can do for your websites. Whether or not to work on these tips is absolutely your own choice.


Sitemaps are in fact extremely valuable tools that you can use to point the strong internal links in the different pages of your website. Internal linking, as we all know is one of the major factors determining the ranking of a website in search engines results. So, adding a sitemap to your website can be doubly beneficial for SEO and for the users as well. Giving some attention to the page will result into better crawling and more internal page ranking in the long run.


Best Ways to Utilize Your Sitemaps


Use the Keywords

Use your main keyword or phrase in each page link that you have placed on the pages you have linked to. To make it more attractive, you can wrap it with a little description as well. The text would also help the users to know about the content of your site.


Group the Links

If you have a long list of links on your sitemap, group them together categorically. This will help your visitors to locate what they are looking for easily and quickly.


Maximum 100 Links Per Page

Well, there isn’t any law on the number of sitemaps on a website. So, if you want you can have more than one sitemaps on your website. It is quite natural that if you have 150 pages on your website, then your sitemap will automatically have 150 links. But, Google doesn’t give any importance to more than 100 links on one page. To be on the safer side, break the links by theme or category and distribute them across two or three sitemaps. Make sure to have a followed link of each on your home page.


Follow and Nofollow

Make sure to have a followed link to your sitemap on the home page and nofollow it on the internal pages of your website.


Use a Different Name

For the convenience of the users and make it easier for them to understand the purpose of the page, you can use other names instead of sitemap; like “index” or “table of contents”.


So, to maximize the advantage of sitemaps use it well and keep it updated - as a well-constructed and updated sitemap can be extremely beneficial for your online business marketing campaign.

For further queries on Seo San Francisco and Internet Marketing based in San Francisco, feel free to contact us.

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