Web Design & SEO Blog, Inverness Blogs

In my last post, I talked about making your site as user-friendly as possible. This post builds on that as we look and users and search engines.

What’s the Problem?
Imagine the scene; you’re late for an interview. Having turned up at the office block in a bit of a hurry, you ask the lady on reception where your interview is to be held, to which she replies:-

“Well now, you go through that door over there, turn left, go right ahead, left again, up two flights of stairs, round the circular meeting room, and take the third right. There are six doors, 3 purple, 2 yellow and one brown. You want the second of the three purple doors and then someone will be waiting for you. Have a good interview”.

So you start on your trail and get lost. No surprises there. Worse, you can’t find your way back to reception to ask the way out. A couple of hours later, you dejectedly leave the building, not having made your interview. Cruelly, if you’d just taken the lift to the fourth floor, your room would have been the door straight after exiting the lift.

The point? It’s about making things easy for your visitor – easy to get to your site, easy to find what they want and making sure they don’t get lost.

Actual Sitemaps
An actual sitemap is a page physically present on your website which visitors can go to and find the part of your website they want, however menus down the line it may be placed.

It may sound like a lot of work for website owners – and it is. But if we want visitors to stay, buy, recommend, refer our website or products then they must be the centre of attention, not us. So you should add a page that has links to important areas of your site.

Comfort for E-Commerce Website Owners
If you run an e-commerce website you don’t need to list all your products, but you may want visitors to easily be able to access the various categories of products.

So go ahead and create a “Site Map” page and provide links to the major sections of your website. Your visitors may thank you. And so may Search Engines.

Sitemap Pages Benefit Search Engines Too
When a Search Engine Spider visits your website it will follow your links around and providing a sitemap page means that search engines will find all your pages.

And Use Keywords In Your SiteMap links. Obviously, use keywords that are relevant to the page you’re sending your visitor or search engine spider. But do not keyword stuff – make your link text make sense, this will give visitors and search engines a good impression that your site makes sense as a coherent whole.

Create an XML Sitemap

What is an XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that sits in your website’s root (or home) directory and is used to provide search engines the full low-down on pages on your website. More often than not, these are simply called sitemap.xml.

These files are also used in conjunction with Google Webmaster Tools to provide Google (or the equivalent on Yahoo) a full list of pages in your site.

There’s no guarantee that search engines will list all your pages, but you don’t have to tell them the pages exist if you have a site-map set up.

Creating an XML Sitemap
Thankfully, there’s plenty of free XML Sitemap generators out there to save us the hassle of creating them, my personal favourite being www.xml-sitemaps.com.

These save a lot of time – especially for large, or e-commerce websites which may have hundreds of pages.

Search engines want to know about your content, so go ahead and create a sitemap.xml file and upload it to your root/home directory today. Then Use Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Sites and let those Search Engines know about your site.

Conclusion

Using actual and XML sitemaps is about making life easy for your visitors, search engines and for you too.

If you can make life easy for visitors, you’re more likely to convert the visit to a sale. If you make life easy for search engines, it can only do your site good in terms of getting your content indexed. And if you’re improving conversions and indexing – even though you’ll need to improve your Search Engine rankings – you’ll be making life easier for yourself and your business.

So what’s holding you back now?