Site Maps

Value to SE Ranking

[businessbytes]

Could someone tell the strategic value to placing a site map on your site and the most adventageous place for them.

[Go60Guy]

Well, the short answer is that a sitemap is a valuable aid to your visitors and it provides "spider food" for the SE bots. If you've listed all your pages on the sitemap, you can be assured that the SEs, especially Google, will find and index them, assuming they're worthy of being indexed.

The best approach is to have a link on your home page, at the very least, to your sitemap. Google, recommends that sitmap pages be limited to no more than 100 links.

Take a look at [google.com...]

My take on it - if Google says to offer your users a site map, then do a sitemap, period.

[pendanticist]

Well put Go60Guy.

Look at it this way businessbytes - there are several files/pages/indices which most all sites provide us, the viewers: 'About this site', some type of 'site search' capability, 'contact' or 'feedback' and the all important 'site map'.

Judging from your query, I'll assume you don't have a site map and provide this tip.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html : Download this application (it's free) and run it on your site. You can configure it several ways, one of which provides a rudimentary site map.

All you need do after you've produced the map is view source, locate that map then copy and paste it into another newly named 'site map' file and viola! There you are, brand new site map in hand.

Pendanticist.

[businessbytes]

Thanks alot folks for the advice. I currently use Front Page and this allows for a table of contents,(site map), to be built starting from any page I identify in my site.

My site is a small business site that is themed to include:
>Management

>Start Up

>Services

>News

It currently has about a 100 pages and I am building many more currently.

My question now surrounds the possible benefits to mini site maps within the particular small business theme, (i.e. Mgmt).

Or is an overall site map on the index more than sufficient? With the comment of google not recommending more than a 100 pages, would mini site maps help and prevent a possibly overweight site map?

[Go60Guy]

My recommendation would be to consider doing a directory as your main sitemap page. List categories and do sitemap subpages for each category with links from the main page. Early on, you may be able to include more than one category on a subpage. Later, as you add more pages, you can restructure the subpages.

This method will introduce good usability for your visitors.

I'm sure you'll get the idea.

[pendanticist]

Or is an overall site map on the index more than sufficient? With the comment of google not recommending more than a 100 pages, would mini site maps help and prevent a possibly overweight site map?

My site map currently contains 169 entries and I'm working on adding roughly 30 more in the next few weeks. I've seen no adverse effects such as you've mentioned.

Pendanticist.

[businessbytes]

What about site map on a shared border?

Adverse affect?

No effect?