Building A Powerful Sitemap - What You Need to Know
Last Edited May 4, 2015 by Super User in Create Sitemaps
Sitemaps play two main roles; improve user experience and ensures that your content is indexed by the search engines. This means that both web visitors and search engine spiders can find your site’s content, which is very important for search engines optimization. Having the links to all pages in a site in just a single page also ensures that you keep your site organized and also serve your visitors to the best of your website's ability. To realize this, you have to ensure that you create a sitemap that meets all the requirements.
Features of a Good Sitemap Page
Even though a sitemap is a page containing links to other pages, just having stand-alone links will be of little value to your visitors even though the search engines may still find the information you intended to share. It is therefore recommended that you include a brief description about the content of the target page in every link. This way, users will use the sitemap as a navigation tool so they can be directed to the information they are seeking with ease. Doing this is now easy with the aid of a sitemap generator.
Adding descriptions to your links is not only important for your visitors, but also for SEO. This is because the search engine spiders will find sufficient keyword-rich content on the sitemap page, making them ideal candidates for better ranking in SERPs. Therefore, building your sitemap as a search engine listing is highly recommended.
One important quality of a good sitemap is the descriptions of each link submitted. The title tags, header, meta descriptions and a brief introductory text are crucial for each link. To realize this with ease, use a sitemap generator to save time because the process is much easier than going it manual.
Building a Good Sitemap
After considereding the above factors, it will be easy to create a sitemap that is both powerful and userful;
1. Web Page: Start by creating a unique web page dedicated for the sitemap. Feel free to get creative doing this to make the page more appealing.
2. Link: To ensure that visitors and search engines can easily spot the sitemap page, link it from the homepage. Practically, every page of your site should have a link to the sitemap.
3. Description: Include a description of the content to each page. You are not helping search engines if the page only contains links, and you also lose out on an opportunity to freely use your targeted keywords which is important for SEO purposes.
4. Anchor Text: Your page title is also an important SEO element for it boosts the link popularity.
5. Categorize: As you set out to create sitemap, treat it like your website’s table of content. Place the content into different related categories and sub-categories. This will enhance the site’s navigation.
Using a visual sitemap generator to create your sitemap is an important milestone for any forward-thinking webmaster because it will boost your users’ experience, expose your site’s content to the search engines, and more importantly, improve the site’s ranking in SERPs. Do it right and reap all of the benefits.
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Create Visual Sitemaps
Create, edit, customize, and share visual sitemaps integrated with Google Analytics for easy discovery, planning, and collaboration.