Home
About
Contact
Services
Social
Testimonials
Newsletters

Traffic
   SEO
      Document Titles
      Key Phrases
      Page Text
      Urls
      Page Structure
      Google Guidelines
      Foreign Domains & Hosting
      Google Trends
      SEO Challenges
      More About Google
      Google SEO 2011
      Google SEO Archive
         Schema
         Google Panda
         Google SEO 2011
         Google Trends 2010
      Google Plus one
   PPC
   Keywords
   Getting Links
      Inbound Links
      Reciprocal Links
   Meta Data
      Meta Descriptions
   Page rank
   Site Maps
      Extended Site Maps
      More SEO Benefits
   Microsites
      Wordpress Setup
      Wordpress Design
      Wordpress Navigation
      Wordpress CMS or Blog?
   Blogging
   Article Marketing
   Online PR
      Planning PR
      PR Marketing
      PR Reach
      PR Integration
      PR That Works
      Local PR
   Video Marketing
      Practical Video
   Youtube Marketing

Conversion
      User Behaviour
      Credibility
      Enough Information
      Google Optimizer
   Web Analytics
   Usability
      behaviour
      Usability Outcomes
   Opt-In-Newsletters
   Workflow/Call to Action
   Navigation
      Page Structure
      Visibility
   Hoverads
   Web 2 Print

Retention
   Social Media
      Facebook
      Making Facebook Work
      facebook Engagement
      Setting Up A Fan Page
      Getting Fans
      Website Plugins
      LinkedIn
   Email Marketing
   CRM's

Resources
   Management
   Ecommerce
   Commission Marketing

Miscellaneous
   Thanks
   Charities
   Affiliates
   Team

Site Maps

>> Extended Site Maps
>> Site Maps - More SEO Benefits

What is a Site Map?

There are 2 basic types of site map. The site map that’s visible to human visitors is usually a single web page within the main website which has a visible hyperlink to it from the main web pages. This web page contains a hierarchical list of hyperlinks to all of the accessible pages in the web site.

The value of this type of Site Map is to not only allow human visitors an additional means of navigating and finding their way around the website, but also to provide the search engines with one single point where it’s possible to access and discover all pages in the website.

The other type of Site Map is an XML Site Map. This code based site map is purely for search engines rather than human visitors, and as such there’s no visible hyperlink to it on web pages. Using this type of Site Map, code inserted into a web page and a robots text file which has instructions for search engines are used.

This type of Site Map uses a coding language that is compatible with that used by web crawlers, and allows the search engines to find and gather information about all of the updated pages within the website. An XML Site map works well with dynamic, non html web pages.

Site Maps and the Search Engines

Web pages are visited by human and non human visitors. Important non human visitors to web pages include the search engine bots. These are responsible for gathering information about the pages in a website so that the pages can be indexed and ranked for key phrases based on the value and weighting that the search engine gives the various page signals.

Search engines are unlikely anyway to access and index all of the pages in most websites, but Site Maps are a way of at least making it easier for search engines to discover more pages.

Site Maps and Human Visitors

Human visitors often want to find specific information or a specific page or section within a website quickly. Sometimes, particularly with very large websites, or where the main navigation menu appears complicated or lacks clarity, visiting the Site Map page is often the quickest route for the human visitor to find what they want.