 Sitemaps and Hypertext Links:
"Food" for Search
Engine Robots
Daria Goetsch
Search Innovation Marketing
March 10, 2003
Sitemaps and hypertext links are "food" for search engine robots. We
will look at the value of text links for optimal spidering, and the
importance of using a sitemap in order to help search engine robots
reach your website's deeper pages.
Hypertext Links
Search engine robots are not terribly sophisticated. They cannot
click a button, submit a form, pull down a menu, or perform any other
type of online "user interaction" that might be used by a human visitor.
Robots are able to index the text on a page and click through hypertext
links. For this reason, adding navigational text links to your web pages
(often located at the bottom of the page) provides the search engine
robots with another means to click through the links of your web pages
when it cannot access these other types of navigation.
No matter how great your JavaScript menu system is, the search engine
robots cannot use it. They can follow "plain old" hyperlinks, and that's
about it. Since the ability to move around on your site is vital to the
robots' successful indexing of your content, you want to make it as easy
as possible for them to visit all of your pages. Use of text links at
the bottom of your pages, while hardly cutting-edge, is one of the best
ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around on your
site. Be sure to include links to your site's principal pages on all the
pages in your site. Always remember to put a link to your sitemap page
here too.
Sitemaps
A sitemap page is a supercharged version of the bottom-of-the-page
hypertext links. The sitemap provides "food" for a hungry search engine
robot. A sitemap page will at very least have links to all of the major
pages on your site. Depending on the size of your site, it may actually
link to all of your pages. This means that once the robot gets to the
sitemap page, it can visit every page on your entire site. Having all of
the content of your site included in the search engine database is a
good thing: you are much more likely to come-up in the search engine
results when somebody is performing a search related to your topic.
A good sitemap will:
-
Provide text links to at least the most important pages on your
site; depending on the size of the site, it may have links to every
page
-
Give a short explanation of each page on your site, to inform your
visitors about your website
-
Give your visitors the information they need when lost in your
website, and show them how to reach the page they are looking for
-
Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order
to reach your most important pages
-
Provide important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and
hypertext links that help the automated search engine robot
"understand" what the page is about
-
Help search engine robots find static landing pages that then link
to dynamically generated pages they may not otherwise find
Even if your website is small, add a sitemap for your visitors and
for the search engine robots.
To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and
your human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the
page URLs and links. Use your keywords in that text, including
appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link. Be careful
not to overuse your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized in
the rankings. Remember that this is a map that will be used by both
search engine robots and your human visitors. If the content of the page
makes sense to the people who visit your site, chances are it will make
sense to the visiting robots as well.
When you make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site, they
will find what they are looking for. When you make it easy to search
engine robots to move around on your site, you increase your chances of
being favorably listed in their search results.
# # #
About The Author
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant
for Search Innovation Marketing (), a Search Engine Promotion
company serving small businesses. She has specialized in search
engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search
Engine Specialist for O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book
publishing company. Copyright © 2002-2004 Search Innovation
Marketing. All Rights Reserved |
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