The What’s, How’s and Why’s of Site Maps

Site maps aren’t the sexiest pages on any web site, but they are necessary for your visitors and for the search engines.

What is a Site Map?

A site map is an outline of your site that has links to the pages on your web site. If your site is huge, you normally have to just create categories pages rather than every single page on your site. Normally you can have all the pages on your site if it’s 100 pages or less. More than that and things seem to get too confusing.

What Kind of Site Maps Should You Have?

There are two different types of site maps and they are used for different reasons. And they have different formats, and it’s good to have both of them.

The first one is an HTML site map. The search engines suggest this to help them index all your pages. You have links to every page on your site that you want indexed. It’s important to have a link to this on the front page and be sure to update it every time you add a new page to your web site.

The second site map is an XML sitemap. The search engines use this as a feed for the pages on your site. Google, Yahoo! and MSN all use the same format for the XML.

Why is it important to have a Site Map?

There are two reasons. One, it helps your visitor find pertinent information on your site. Most sites don’t have a search box on their site so you need to display where all your information is so the visitor can find it. Two, the search engines like you to have them so they can index all your pages.

How do You Create a Site Map?

For the HTML site map, you can do it by hand just like you’d do with any HTML page. With database driven web sites, you can set it up so that the site map is automatically generated from the pages in your web site, that way you don’t have to change the site map every time you add a new page to your site.

For an XML sitemap, there are free site map generators out there. I like to use www.freesitemapgenerator.com. It’s a great tool. You can also create it by hand. Or if you have a database driven web site, you can program it to automatically generate the XML site map.

What are Some Other Uses for a Site Map?

Every site should have a custom 404 page. This is a page that someone lands on when they land on your site from a dead link or have typed in a page name no longer on the on the server.

Copy the HTML site map and put it on your 404 Page Not Found page. That way the visitor can still navigate to the page they were looking for. It makes good usability sense to do this on your site.

How Do the Search Engines Find the Site Maps?

It’s good to put a text link on all of your pages to the HTML site map. This way your visitors can also go to this if they can’t find what they are looking for through your normal navigation. And it is helpful to the search engines to have a text link in order to index your page.

The search engines will find your XML site map, too. But it is a good practice to tell the search engines the name of your XML site maps through the webmaster tools. For Google you can do this by logging into your Google Account and going to the Webmaster Tools. Then go to the Site Maps link on the left and tell Google the name of page. You should name it sitemap.xml.

So, that is the essence of site maps. Implement both of these as soon as you can on your site. It will benefit you in the search engines and your visitors will appreciate it, too.