24 Oct 09 SiteMaps and HyperLinks

Sitemaps and hyperlinks are the keys to attract search engine robots to your website. We will look into various techniques related to text links for searchbot optimized websites, and the importance of sitemap in order to help search engine robots to dig deep into your website.

Text Links

Search engine robots or oftenly called searchbots are not terribly sophisticated. They cannot perform action such as button click, form submission or any other action that any human visitor might perform. Searchbots are able to index the page content and click through hyperlinks on the web page. For this reason, adding navigational text links to your web pages provides the search engine robots with another means to click through the links of your web pages when it cannot access these other types of navigation.

No matter how great your JavaScript menu system is, afterall its just a script that any searchbots can't use. Search Engine Robots can only follow plain hyperlinks. Since the ability to move around on your site is vital to the searchbots for successful indexing of your website content, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to visit all of your pages. Use of text links at the bottom of your pages, while hardly cutting edge, is one of the best ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around your site. Be sure to include links to your site's principal pages on all the pages in your site. Always remember to put a link to your sitemap page here too.

Site Maps

A sitemap is a optimized and effective version of your navigation links for searchbots. A sitemap will have links to all of the major pages on your site. You may list all your links in the sitemap for the best performance. This means that once the robot gets to the sitemap page, it can visit every page on your entire website with minimal effort. Having all of the content of your site included in the search engine database is a good idea to improve your search engine ranking and your website page rank.

Now next question one can ask is, What a good sitemap contains? Answer is simple. Sitemap should provide following information:

1. Provide text links to at least the most important pages on your site; depending on the size of the site, it may have links to every page. 2. Give a short explanation of each page on your site, to inform your visitors about your website. 3. Give your visitors the information they need when lost in your website, and show them how to reach the page they are looking for. 4. Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important pages. 5. Provide important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links that help the automated search engine robot understand what the page is about. 6. Help search engine robots find static landing pages that then link to dynamically generated pages they may not otherwise find.

Even if your website is small, adding a sitemap for your visitors and for the search engine robots (search bots) is highly recommended and should be part of your website optimization.

To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and your human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. Use your keywords in that text, including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link. Be careful not to overuse your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized in the rankings. Remember that this is a map that will be used by both search engine robots and your human visitors. If the content of the page makes sense to the people who visit your site, chances are it will make sense to the visiting robots as well.

When you make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for. When you make it easy to search engine robots to move around on your site, you increase your chances of being favorably listed in their search results.

About the author: Paras Shah