Sitemaps - roadmaps for visitors and search engines

What are sitemaps?

There are two types of sitemaps - a navigational sitemap, which is intended for your website visitors and search engines, and a search engine sitemap, which is intended primarily for search engines.  The latter, which you actually submit to search engines to let them know where your content is, which content is most important, and how often your content is updated, we'll talk about later.  For now, you want to add a navigational sitemap to your website.

What is a navigational sitemap?

A navigational sitemap provides a road map of your website that can be used by your visitors, as well as by search engine spiders crawling your website pages. Your sitemap should reflect your content hierarchy described above. You'll notice in the footer of all our pages a link to our sitemap.  The sitemap lists our main categories followed by sub-categories.  By clicking on any one category or sub-category, you'll find a listing of the content to be found there.  In this way, every one of our content articles, or keyphrase pages, can be reached via the sitemap. 

The sitemap in the footer may not be all that obvious.  You'll also notice in our main menu the menu item categories.  We use this to give users instant access to our primary categories, or the level in the content hierarchy just below the root level, or main page.  From there, content branches down into sub-categories.  That way our visitors can quickly find what they're looking for.

What is a search engine sitemap?

A search engine sitemap is one that is used to convey information about your pages directly to a search engine.   The top three search engines - Google, Yahoo, and MSN, each allow you to submit your search engine sitemaps to them in order to keep them informed of the changes and updates on your website.  A search engine sitemap can be submitted in a variety of ways.  The recommended method is by way of a regularly updated XML (eXtensible Markup Language) file.  The file will tell the search engine when new content is added, when existing content is updated, how often it is updated, and which content you consider to be more important than the rest.  You can submit sitemaps to all three major search engines:

• Google: sign up for Google's Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo: sign up for Yahoo's Site Explorer
• MSN (now called Microsoft Live): sign up for MS Webmaster Tools

Signing up for these sitemap services will provide you with some useful tools in addition to you being able to keep search engines updated on your website content updates.  Since Google provides the vast majority of traffic to sites via its search engines, we're going to go into more detail on its Webmaster Tools.

Next up: Google's webmaster tools

Google's webmaster tools allow you to see some of what the Googlebot (the name of Google's search engine spider) sees.  This perspective will lend you valuable insight into how your pages, and website as a whole, are performing in Google's point of view.  Check out our article on the advantages of using Google's Webmaster Tools.