We've all heard about the various reasons why you should have a site map. Googleguy himself has even suggested you can use it to help direct the page rank to various areas within your site. With the apparent new importance of outbound links on a page for good rankings, it would seem a site map would be the type of page that would do well in the serps. However, they typically aren't set up for users. So what other formats can we come up with to help point the crawler in the right direction, yet still keep usability and 'look' at a high level. Additionally, I am finding that with a usable page as a site map, I can get external links to the page functioning as a sitemap. In most cases, the index page for a directory acts as the site map, or table of contents and you can get external links to these. In my case, I was having a problem getting the spider down to my photo gallery pages, which were three clicks from the subdirectory index and four from the root. So I created a a photo gallery index, linked from the home page. Now the pages within the galleries are all 3 clicks from the home page, which is good. But what is better is that since this form of site map is targeted to a certain area of my site, I can make it usable, AND i can get lots of quality incoming links to it. Some of them wouldn't link to my site as a whole, but in this format they do. Now the gallery pages are only two links from the source of external pr and the incoming links are providing a source of traffic that didn't exist for me prior to this.
What other ways are there to make your site maps both more user and a source of traffic?
