SEO Denver

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Sitemap Structure

If you’ve had your blog or page for several months now, you may have amassed many – even hundreds – of separate blog posts and new pages. After all that work, it is necessary to help search engines robots that reach your page find each one. This adds strength to your page as engines seem to like page volume. And when a user searches for an unusual set of information that might match the topic of an old blog post, you want that page to show up on the search results. A staggeringly high percentage of search phrases have never been searched on before, so the sheer volume of different articles increases the opportunity for readers to find your pages and blog.

Some years ago, I made an obscure reference in a history blog to the 1982 Falklands War – something few folks even remember. Yet, after all this time, someone searched on that phrase and found my old article! Even though the article wasn’t about the war itself, the reference within the text was sufficient to guide the search engines to it. And after all the work you put in to generate these articles, you still want to maximize their value even though they might be a bit out of date. So why not help the search engines find all of your material?

The central method of helping the search engines catalogue and understand the entire content of your site is the ‘sitemap.’ Sitemaps typically take two forms:

• XML sitemap and
• HTML sitemap

Each is important and you will certainly help yourself in all your SEO and other efforts to attract traffic if you include both types within your website.

XML Sitemap:

XML or “Xtensible” Markup Language isn’t anything you would want to read unless you love losing yourself in the jibberish of the code world. These pages are prepared for the primary benefit of the search engine robots. XML is easily read and robots can quickly go through the entire sitemap and understand the complete content of your site.

HTML Sitemap:

HTML of course is the language used to construct most webpages. HTML is readable and the main feature of your HTML sitemap is that it should be both readable and linked to each page a particular line references. An HTML sitemap would simply be a table of contents to your site where each line is a link to that page of content.

As you may have hundreds of pages, assembling this detail into proper form would be an unbelievable pain if done by hand. Fortunately, there are a few free tools that can help. XML Sitemaps On Line, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ offers a free tool for preparing a sitemap of up to 500 pages. This tool will prepare both the XML and HTML sitemaps, although the HTML version might not fit in the design of your site. There are in fact several of these tools out there, so run a search and try them out to see which works best for you.

Using a free tool like this one will require you to enter your URL and the system will search all pages within that environment. The system will then catalogue each page and prepare the sitemap lines in proper format. All you do is download the output to your computer and then upload the entire thing to your website. You can view the source code of other sitemaps to see how it looks if you are curious.

The directions on these tools are usually complete and thorough. You will need to prepare a page called “Sitemap” for the XML version and “HTML Sitemap” for the HTML one. Look at other pages to see where a good place might be to place links to these pages. You should have links to both of these on your main landing page. The search engine bots have got to be able to see these links before they can catalogue the content contained within.

Once completed, it is a good idea to directly submit your XML sitemap to the search engines directly. This will cause a robot to visit the site and provide you with a diagnostic report to make sure you got it all installed properly. And once installed, update your sitemap as the volume of pages and content increases. After all, you want the search engines to know about everything you worked so hard to produce.