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.

Once you have an online presence for your offline business, you must let people know your website is out there for them to view.

Contrary to popular opinion, people do not know you have a website simply because you created one, or had one created for you.

That said, one of the easiest ways to get the word out about your website is to get it listed in the search engines, so people who use sites like Google and Yahoo search can more easily find you on the World Wide Web.

How do you do get on the internet search engines?

Initially, you start with the two most basic steps: using meta-tags and creating a site map.

What are Meta-tags?

Meta-tags are small bits of HTML code you add to your web pages that provide the name/title and a description of your pages plus the top keywords a visitor could use to find your page if searching with those words. If you provide these, it makes it a lot easier for potential visitors to find you, even though meta-tags do not show up to your visitors on your web pages.

Your website visitors do not see them, but search engines do, and they use this information to help them properly list your website in their search results. How? The keywords you use in your meta tags help search engines understand the subject and type of information your website offers potential visitors.

This, in turn, allows the search engines to provide searchers with a more accurate, relevant list of web sites, based on the keywords used in the search, to visit and find what they were looking for.

How are meta-tags constructed?

What follows is a sample of a set of meta-tags containing meta-data (descriptions and keywords) that can be added to the HTML code of the pages of your website.
<meta-name=”description” content=”This is where you will add one or two sentences describing the content to be found on this page.>

<meta-name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyphrase”>

<title>This will be the title of your page</title>

Each page in your website will have meta-data that is slightly different from previous pages because each page in your website will contain different content but every page should contain at least this bare minimum of information.
Once you have your meta-tags in place, you can move on to the creation of your site map. We’ll talk about that in Getting Visitors To A New Business Website Part 2.