Sitemap Basics and Why You Need One

by Victor J. McCoy
3vdesignmedia.com

Developing a sitemap is the optimal way to begin the development of your website.Your website should be the "hub" of all your marketing efforts - digital and traditional. It is the central recording unit for provides a great amount of data concerning your customers, potential customers- B2C. It also provides very useful information for B2B engagement. Today's' marketing environment demands detailed information to make sound business decisions. While gathering that information has become easier, the sources of that information are plenteous. Choosing what information you need is very important and should be known by you.

The initial concept of what your website should look like and function should work in concert with your marketing objective. The design should focus on how best your visitors will interact with your website. It should not be designed solely based upon search engine optimization practices. Do not design your website for the search engines,design it for the visitors,design it for people - whats best for them.

 You could begin with a sketch like this. Yes it's basic,but it will help you communicate to the designer exactly what you are looking for and why. You should do this for each page. You can add the color combinations you want for each page. Let the web designer handle the technical aspects of the design.This should be completed before work on your website begins. In some cases, it may not be necessary for a redesign.

Concerning your sitemap and the search engine there are two types of sitemaps: xml sitemap (for search engines) and html sitemap (for visitors). Below is the difference:

An XML sitemap:
- Ensures better visibility by search engines
- Enables you to rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site.
- Helps with broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way
- Alerts search engines to any changes/additions to your site
- Helps you choose pages that you don’t want to index

An HTML sitemap:
- Ensures improved search and navigation by human visitors
- Improves user experience thereby reducing bounce rate
- Helps you distribute links to various pages of the website

 Here is a little more technical drawing:

This drawing list the drop down menu headings but not how each page will be structured.

In addition, you can also use Sitemaps to provide search engines with metadata about specific types of content on your site, including video, images, mobile, news, and software source code. For example, a video Sitemap entry can specify the running time, category, and family-friendly status of a video; an image Sitemap entry can provide information about an image’s subject matter, type, and license. You can also use a Sitemap to provide additional information about your site, such as the date it was last updated, and how often you expect the page to change. We recommend that you use a separate Sitemap to submit News information.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• In making sure your sites design easily directs your visitors to what they will be looking for.

• Your site has dynamic content.

• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Search bot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.

• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Search bot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)

• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Search Engines use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow your webmaster better optimize your site first for your visitors and second for SEO.