Site Maps Used to Help Search Engines Find Your Pages

Site Maps are great things to use on your site to help Search Engines find all the pages on your site. You want to make it easy for the search engines to find all the pages on your site and that they are all indexed. It is important to get all your pages indexed to give search engines an assortment of different pages to access your site. I have typed in some search text into Google and could see sometimes 10 pages from my site listed in the search result.

The best way to insure that all your pages are indexed properly is to have a Site Map on your site, which is a list of all the links to all the pages on your site. There should be a direct link to the Site Map page from your home pages. Each page on the site should have a direct link to its URL from the site map. In this way there is a direct link from the Site Map pages to all the pages on your site.

A Site Map is like a Table of Content of a book, where all the contents of the site are listed. Also a site map is a good way to navigate a site and for some sites I have found them to be the most useful way to navigate a site. The site map should clearly show the various divisions (sections) of the site and it should state what is contained in each of the sections.

There are over 50 million websites and over 8 billion web pages indexed by Google. You can be certain that many more billion of pages will be added in the future. Since there are so many websites now people are depending much more on search engines to find information and less often use directories to find information. Therefore it is critical to get listed fully on the important search engines.

A search engine like Google first searches through your home page then follows all the links on your pages to find other pages to index. Which is why they suggest that you just submit your homepage and then their spider will naturally find all the other pages on your site. More pages are indexed in this way than by manually submitting each individual page. This may be great in theory but it definitely is not always true.

Sometime search engines have problems finding all the pages on a site, especially as the pages are found more deeply on the site. This is when a Site Map comes in really useful because it gives a link to all the pages on your site from a page that is linked to directly from the Home Page. It is best to place the Site Map in the root directory of the site (the one the home index page is located).

Make it easy for viewers to see the link to your site map on your main home page, as people will often want to use it to see what is on your site. Call it “Site Map” as this is a term that many people clearly understand. Make the link to your Site Map and all the links in the site map simple HTML links because if you use graphics or JavaScript the search engine will not be able to follow the links. Make the link to your Site Map and all the links in the site map simple HTML

A good idea is to use the full title name of each page as the link to that page. If this is too long use a word or phrase that clearly describes what is contained in the page it links to.

Submit both you home page and Site Map pages when submitting your site to search engines.

Google crawls the web about once a month. After you submit a site you have to wait until the search engine crawls the web for your new site to be indexed. This is also true when you add new pages to your site. The lower pages usually will not be indexed right away as the Google search engines may take several paths though a websites, getting more interested on each pass. But using a site map you can really speed up the process.

To see if a page has been picked up by Google you first go to
www.google.com and use the “allinurl” command in the search box:
allinurl:yourdomain.com/yourpage.html

Where “yourdomain.com/yourpage.html” is the URL of the page you want to check.