Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of pages from a web site, that are often arranged in a tree or hierarchical type format, and are essentially used to provide a universal site navigation point, allowing each and every page to become accessible to web crawlers and search engine robots.

In the early days, robots could only crawl pages down to a certain level. Anything beyond level 2 in the heirarchical structure was out of reach, therefore many pages went un indexed and around 60% of the web was unreachable by search engines.

To remedy this, developers used a site map page which links every page in a format that conveys the level heirachy in a tree like structure. This brings every page within level 2 of the heirarchy, and therefore more visible for indexing.

Think of the way a table of contents is fomatted in a text book, quickly referencing chapters and pages by title and page number. No matter where or how deep the level of a page is, search engines could index the entire site from that one page, providing that was within reach also.

These days however, search engine algorithms are much more highly developed, and dig much deeper and more vigourously than ever before. So how does a sitemap help SEO?

Index Speed

If your site is a new launch, it could take anything from weeks, to months, to even years to fully index your site in search engine records.

This could be due to any number of reasons, but it is most likely reflecting a low PR ranking value, low amount of inbound links or redundant content.

Employing a sitemap could speed up the indexing process, and get your SEO campaign on the move.

Having your site fully indexed is not only useful, but is essential for your SEO campaign. Before we can work on optimising page content, we need to make sure content is fully and easily accessible for search engines to find, and incorporating a sitemap in your level two heirarchy quickly re-ensures all site content is accessible for quick and speedy indexing.

PR Ranking & Link Density

For those of you who don't know, Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that measures a websites popularity based on the quantity and quality of incoming links. The higher value, the more popular and therefore more important your site is.

If a query is submitted in Google, with words and phrases that relate to your page content, in theory it should succeed higher rankings than a web page with lower or no PageRank.

So the quantity and quality of inbound links is very important, but how does a sitemap help?

A sitemap generates inbound links, and increases your sites link density. A link on your site, pointing to another page on your site, carries as much PR weight as any other link on the web.

Not only does a sitemap optimise your sites link density, but it also contains optimised anchor text, with keywords and phrases being consolidated in the level two heirarchy.

Exploit this SEO tip cautiously. Be wise to potential spam risks and keep the structure legitimate.