My Hosting Tips

Constructing A Sitemap

Reason for building a sitemap
Sitemaps provide an easy way for visitors to see and navigate the layout of your website. A sitemap is not just for human visitors but search engine spiders as well. Your sitemap should be constructed like the outline of a book. Although this is not the only way to create a sitemap it will be the easiest way for visitors to get where they want the quickest.

Implementation of your sitemap
The method of linking to your sitemap must be visible not only on your homepage but on every page in your site. It should be consistently located in the same spot on every page so visitors do not have to spend too much time in locating it. Your sitemap should contain all of the main categories of your internet site with all subcategories relevant to them listed like the table of contents in a book. The links in your sitemap need to be simple but descriptive with your keywords so visitors know where they are navigating to. This also aids the search engines when they crawl your site.

Using your sitemap as a default error page
A 404 error page is a page that displays the page cannot be found and as a result most visitors will hit the back button or go back to the search engine looking for another site. Using your sitemap for this default error page you will get the opportunity to keep the visitors that you might have lost. Your custom 404 error page should look like the rest of your Website pages. Creating a custom 404 error page is an important part of the search engine optimization process as well. During the life of your website pages are going to be moved edited and removed. When your website is reindexed instead of seeing the pages that no longer exist the spider will be sent to the site map on the custom 404 page. Either way whether it is a human or a computer that visits your site going to a page with content is far better than seeing nothing at all.

About the writer:  Monique Frecker is Creative Director of Justice Young a Cincinnati marketing and public relations firm.

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