All SEO Friendly domains should have a site map. Site maps are an excellent way to offer 'Spider Bait' with optimized link text to the spiders.
A site map consists of anchor links (<a href> ) links pointing to every page in your site. In an eCommerce site this would include all product pages and all category pages; for a general information site every article would be indexed along with the category it was in. More than one site map may be necessary depending on the size of the SEO site. The text of the link should be the search phrase you want the target page found for. It is also a good idea to use the title tag of the destination page as the title tag in the anchor on the site map page. Use the key search phrase or product name as the text for the link. It is also important to link the site map it from all pages in your website. This link is usually placed at the bottom of the page as it's not designed to be part of the main navigation. This is done to provide visibility to the site map from any landing page so that it's useful to search engine as well as spiders human visitors .
As a rule, a web page should never have more than 100 links on it. When a site grows to hundreds and even thousands of pages, a single sitemap page with all of the links on the site would become monstrous. In this case you would have a master Site Map with all of your site Catagories, then smaller site maps with links to content pages in that category. |
