Site maps - what's the purpose?

[neophyte]

I've never done a site which incorporates a site map page - I've never had a client request one, nor have I ever suggested it's inclusion because I've never been very clear on their necessity/desirability.

I've done some reading lately, however, and have come to understand that a site map page (with a home page link) is helpful for:

Search Engine spidering and as a source for printed documentation of a site layout.

Is there anything else I'm missing here in regards to the usefulness of such a page?

I'm thinking that maybe visually-disabled accessability may be another reason to want to employ a site map page, but that's just a guess.

Any and all opinions on this topic greatly appreciated.

Neophyte

[phantombookman]

Ease of navigation for visitors
distribution of PR
SE spiders (as mentioned)
Link anchor text
Lastly - just general good practice
Regards
Rod

[neophyte]

Phantombookman -

Thanks for the clairification, but if I could follow-up on a two of the things you indicated:

What is "distribution of PR" and what do you mean by "Link anchor text"? Just the fact that people could "click" links on within the site map to navigate the site?

What about issues of accessability for the visually disabled? Does having a sitemap page promote accessability for diabled visitors? I assume it would but don't really know enough about accessability to be sure.

Neophyte

[webtress]

As a user I often use a company's sitemap to located pages that aren't eaisly accessed without more than 3 clicks. For a sitemap to be of greater search engine benefit it is reconmmended that each page of the site contains a link to the sitemap.

[jdMorgan]

> What is "distribution of PR" and what do you mean by "Link anchor text"? Just the fact that people could "click" links on within the site map to navigate the site?

Google's PageRank is calculated from links pointing to a page. A site map offers a way to contribute page rank to some of your deeper pages, and to help all spiders find those deeper pages.

Link anchor text is the text that shows up with a blue line under it when you browse Web pages. Search engines that use theming will pick up on this text and credit the "keywords" in the link text to the page being linked to. Sometimes you will find pages in the search results that have no text on them (example: MacroMedia Flash pages) and have not had any SEO-type work on them. So how did they show up in the results for the search terms you used? They had those terms in the link anchor text of links pointed to that page.

I haven't thought about the visually-impaired aspect of a site map, but it does sound like it could improve the accessibility of your site for people using a screen reader, especially if you keep the page design very simple, provide clear, concise descriptions of each page, and group the page listings in an obvious, meaningful way.

Jim

[Stefan]

Apart from the SE side of things, it enables visitors to find all of the pages. If it's a site like the one that I run, that has terrible navigation and hundreds of pages, it's a great help to anyone who really wants to dig into what's available. Of course, I still don't have a site map, but I intead to get on that one of these days.. ;-)

[pageoneresults]

You can also have multiple site maps. I like to refer to them as Index Pages for their particular section of the site. They are the entrance pages that contain a listing of pages within that section. Then on your site map, list the main index pages with their sub-pages. Unordered and Ordered Lists are the correct way to construct those pages. ;)

<added> I should point out that these Index Pages are on the creative side. These are not plain pages with just links. There are titles with short descriptions, almost like a directory listing. There may even be an image associated with each <li>. That page could be broken down into sub-sections that are structured using semantic markup.

lol, I've been hanging out at the W3C too much. My brain hurts!