Adbeau Productions Inc.

Last time, we talked about adding meta-tags to your web pages to help search engines find and properly index your website. This time we’ll talk about using a site map to help both your site visitors and the search engines locate all the pages on your website – not just the home page.

A site map is really nothing more than a simple table of contents that lists and links to all the relevant pages of your website – pages relevant to your visitors’ search for information, products, and services you provide.

If your website is only two levels deep, meaning your website only has a few pages other than the home page and your visitor can reach all of those pages from a link on your home page, a site map really isn’t necessary. Your navigation should be fine for helping visitors find their way around your site.
However, if your website contains second-level pages that link out to third and even fourth-level pages, it makes sense to provide a site map for visitors to find their way around your website. A site map on your web site functions just like a street map works to help people find your store or place of business offline.

A site map is usually constructed in “top down” order, meaning the first listing would be your Home page, and your second-level pages would be listed beneath it, with relevant third-level pages listed beneath second-level pages, and so on.

If you compared a site map to a Table of Contents such as might be found in a book, the first listing would be the book’s title. Below that, you might have a listing for each chapter in the book, and below each of those, you might have a listing of relevant topics covered in each chapter.
Here is an example:

Learn To Grow Ripe, Succulent Tomatoes

In the example above, “Learn to Grow Ripe, Succulent Tomatoes” is the Home page of the web site.
From this Home page, a visitor could click a link to a “section” of the web site that is all about starting their tomato garden using seeds that would later be transplanted into their garden. Thus the “Starting Your Tomato Plants From Seeds” page is a second-level page in the web site.

This second-level page would likely have links that branch off from the information provided on it to additional pages that provide even more in-depth tomato-growing, seed-choosing information, such as “How to Pick the Most Healthy Seeds.”

Finally, a visitor to this site might prefer to get seeds this site recommends directly from the site rather than try and locate them themselves offline, so there might be a fourth-level page where the web site allows their visitors to order seeds directly from their site.

After you’ve created your site map, be sure to link to it from your main navigation, which ideally appears on all the pages in your web site.