Things to Consider When Building An Effective Sitemap

All too often web designers neglect to include an important building block in their website design structure, a Sitemap. Including an effective Sitemap provides a great website foundation for online viewers to navigate where they want to go efficiently and also provides easy indexing for search engines spiders.

A site map can be a simulated to that of any tree-like formation. The trunk of the tree represents the website home page and the branches of the tree represents secondary level pages such as Company, About, Services etc.

Here are some things to consider when building an effective Sitemap that will provide a good user experience and enhance SEO rankings for a company website:

• Take The Time Needed To Research, Plan And Execute A Sitemap

Starting with a well-planned site map will serve to benefit any sized company’s marketing/design team, as it will be easier down the road when it comes to building up or revamping the website.

• Establish And Be Consistent With Url Structure

For purposes of enhancing SEO capabilities, establishing and being consistent throughout the site with URL structure is important. Keeping with an optimal naming convention and/or keeping keywords in URL lowercase are good examples of consistency requirements.

• Make The Sitemap Link Obvious

Avoid burying sitemaps deep within the website itself as users will be unable to navigate to it. Best practice would be to include a Sitemap link obvious and place it on every page on the website. If however, websites are numerous pages long, only include Sitemap links on key, important pages.

• Avoid Link Congestion

If there are too many links on the main site map, it is best practice to move some of the links to other pages. Large corporations would be the only entity that would include up to 100 links on one page for a Sitemap.

An effective Sitemap may take some time to plan out, but it’s worth the effort given the benefits it provides online users and SEO business rankings. Online viewers that can easily navigate a company website are likely to take the time to source out what they need and that typically evolves into a probable sale for a businesses. Popular search engines that are able to effectively index and crawl a Sitemap are more likely to boost business SEO rankings. An effective Sitemap is a beneficial tool all businesses should take advantage of.