Site Map

Would a site map help for SEO or would there be too many links on one page to make a difference?

 

HELPS...

Assists visitors/customers as well re: overall site navigation.
Simply put - A VERY GOOD IDEA.

 

My advice is make a sitemap for your visitors (unfortunately it's the easiest way to navigate some sites). And generally it's a good idea for SEO purposes as well

 

IMO, a site map is a must.

Not only does it help your clients find pages but it helps spiders too.

You can always have more than one site map if you think there are too many links on one page.

 

Search engines, especially Google, love to have a site map so they can quickly access your site's pages for indexing. When you create your site map for your web site, be sure to put it at the root level (not within any subfolders or directories), link to it from your home page, and name it site_map.html (or .htm, whichever extension you are using for your site). Use standard navigation on the site map, meaning create the page as though it is another page on your site, so include your standard navigation menus at the left, bottom, etc.

Simply create a list of links (similar to an outline format) that shows how the pages of your site are linked to from each upper tier page, and name these links using keyword-rich, but relevant, text links (basically, you don't want to name the link to your bird house page Bird Food and Bird Houses. Add a small paragraph about your company, or about your product line, at the top of the page. Keep the site map page simple, using no graphics (or very few if necessary, perhaps your company logo). And when submitting your site's pages to the major engines, be sure to submit the site map page as well as your home page.

 

exactly, a sitemap will help search engines identify your pages !!

 

site maps aren't always necessary though. I've worked on dozen of smaller sites where every page of the site was found on the left or bottom navigation. There was no need for a site map because the crawlers could find every page of the site from any page of the site.

 

I have heard a few seo experts say that google and many of the spiders or bots will only follow about 20 to 50 links on a page and not go any further. So it is best to keep your website pretty flat and close to your index page. With this suggestion I have heard that you site map should be seperate into a site map 1, site map 2, site map 3 and so on if you have a huge site. Therefore your site map will only have between 20 to 50 links on any one page.

I have seen this effectivly done by a site map for each section of the website.

Not sure if this is a help but it seems to be effective on a few of site that I have seen.

Thanks
Ichibanda

 

Sorry to be a pain, but I think site-map would be the best way to name it as "-" is seen as a spacer while "_" technically isn't.

 

SEbasic, don't apologize, this is a common belief that needs to be adjusted. The more of us that speak up, the better. I usually don't say anything, I think I'll start.