Sitemap Construction - A Beginners Guide

Imagine taking a vacation to a foreign city without a map. In as much as you may be able to find yourself around using road signs and asking around, you will get lost so many times that you might even decide abort the trip or choose a different destination. This is the dilemma most web surfers experience whenever they land on information-rich websites. The same is experienced by the search engines because it becomes difficult to search and crawl all the pages as expected. If your content is not crawled, then it automatically means that millions of users using your target keywords on search engines for information will not be able to find you. You need a map that you can easily create with the help of a sitemap creator.

Offering your visitors a sitemap will not only ensure that they find the information they are seeking in time, but also the search engines spiders. Research indicates that web surfers are generally impatient (who wouldn’t with millions of other options?) and therefore don’t waste time trying to fish out information from a website that appears disorganized. Sitemaps are purposely designed to fix this problem, and that is one of their most important uses.

Sitemaps for Navigation

Website navigation has to be as simple as possible. The core of every site’s navigation lies in the use of a sitemap. No one honestly has the time to wade through one page after another in search of content. If they cannot find the information they need, they are at liberty to move to other sites. Assuming the user was a buying customer-it is money lost for your business. Don’t let that happen because you can use a sitemap creator easily and fast.

Constructing a Sitemap

Creating a sitemap can be a tedious process, especially if you choose to do it manually. You definitely will require some HTML and XML knowledge, which is no longer a necessity if you choose to use a sitemap creator like DYNO Mapper. Below is a simple outline on how you can construct your sitemap.

• The complete scope of your site must be well understood. Start by drafting a diagram of the site and move from there.
• If there is a site with similar content, check out its sitemap, especially how it is presented, the layout, arrangement of links, all along making notes.
• Create a list of all major categories then sub-categories that should then act as the site’s index.
• Move from subsections and fragment further to pages based on the commonality of the content. It is here that your visitors will eventually land for the information.
• Draft a brief description for every category and sub-category and add them to the sitemap’s outline
• If all looks good, create the webpage and upload the sitemap to the site.

The above process has been simplified, thanks to sitemap creator you can now have all that done pretty fast with utmost accuracy. It is recommended that the sitemap page be used as your default page.