Site Maps: Acting as Guides to your Site For the Search Engines

Consider your website as a tourist spot that you would want people to visit. And consider the search engines to be the tourists who want to have a great time visiting your site, not missing out the important landmarks there and then tell others about what a great place your site is by indexing it. The question arises who will act as the tour guide to provide all the important information as well as routes to your tourist place? If you ask me, I would say-The Site Map of your website can perform this role perfectly.

Basically, a site map is a page or a collection of pages all linked together that includes links to every other page in your site. If you want the search engines to find all the pages of your site, you need to have a good site map that allows the search engines to spider every single page of your site. What you do is, provide a link to your site map page from your homepage, so that there is no need to provide all the links to different pages of your site from the home page itself. The idea is that more the links on the homepage, more the time taken by search engines to spider your whole site. Also as and when your site grows with passing time, you cannot put all the links on the homepage, otherwise the homepage will look like a cluttered collage of links, confusing the visitors as well as making it difficult and time consuming for the search engines to index your entire site.

Infact site map can be an excellent navigation system for the information hungry visitors and relevant content hungry search engine spiders. Though the most ignored or neglected part of web site building, site maps can be a very valuable tool for getting higher rankings for your site in lesser time.

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