Site Maps, SEO and Success

Site owners pay search engine optimization firms a great deal of money to have their sites more easily recognized by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN - the big three. Or, they go out and spend a bundle on SEO software that may or may not deliver improved results when it comes to their site's page rank (PR). Or, they try to learn SEO themselves with little to show for the time invested in trying to understand Google's latest algorithm (ranking formula).

SEO is what drives traffic to one site over another based on the site's rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher the ranking, the higher up in the SERPs and if your site isn't listed on the first or second SERP, chances are you won't see too much SE-driven, organic traffic on your site.

SEO: What's at Stake?

Most site owners, and even many SEO professionals, think it's all about page rank. It's not. In fact, when you think about it, only 40 or 50 links can actually appear on page one and two of Google's SERPs and Google users rarely go beyond the second SERP because sites are listed by their relevance to the user's query or key words. How often do you look at page 46 of Google's SERPs when conducting a search? Never.

So, if only 40 to 50 sites can appear on the first two SERPs, what's the SEO industry really based on? It can't just be page rank and it isn't.

Despite the fact that we all rely on search engines, the fact is they aren't very thorough or efficient. After all, search engine bots don't think, they're incapable of recognizing relationships between text, they can't read text in graphics and they only spend enough time spidering a site to actually index it.

Properly Indexing a Site

Being mis-indexed by a search engine is a serious and big problem. If you exclusively sell tennis gear online and your site is indexed as a sporting goods site, you're going to have a lot of unhappy bowlers and archers coming to your site and leaving quickly once they realize the SE's mistake. You've been mis-indexed.

It happens all of the time and it's a difficult problem to overcome once it's occurred. In order to avoid being mis-indexed, it's essential that spiders see your site for what it truly is - a top-down inspection of every page.

Avoiding Partial Indexing

In the early days of search engines (1994 saw the creation of the first SE by Yahoo) spiders relied on HTML meta tags, title tags, descriptors and keyword density to index a site. So, if everything pointed to a site selling tennis gear, the site might be properly indexed - but there were never any guarantees.

Spiders don't necessarily index every page of a web site. And they don't give much credence to key words provided by the site owner in metas and title tags - especially since site owners overstuff these HTML conventions with bogus or mis-leading key words that diminish the quality of the SERPs. That makes search engines angry.

Instead, today's spiders follow links - links within a site and links to and from a site. As such, many sites are only partially indexed with, say, 50% of the site's pages actually indexed back at SE headquarters. This means that critical pages - pages deep in content or detailed product descriptions - may not be picked up the first, second or third time a site is spidered and that means only half of the site's pages are assessed for relevance when compiling the SERPs for given key words.

SEO isn't just about improving page rank. It's about making your site more accessible and understandable to SE spiders to avoid mis-indexing or partial indexing - two mistakes that can be very costly to a site owner.

Search Engine Spiders Follow Links

Spiders don't just randomly move from one page of a site to another or from one site to another. They follow links. Think of links as the roads on which spiders travel.

As a site owner, you want to provide a road map of your entire site to the next visiting spider. And what's the easiest and most efficient way to do that? Provide a site map. It sounds so simple but a lot of site owners don't do it.

Site Maps and SEO Success

Site maps are useful for visitors navigating your site. They get lost. Or want to get back to a particular page, they just click on the site map then click on the page they're after. It's an excellent and necessary navigation tool designed to make it easier for humans to find their way from here to there.

Just as critical is the role site maps play in directing spiders to the four corners of your web site. A site map is simply a collection of links to all of the different zones within a site. A site map would show the Welcome page, the About Us page, the Contact Us page and other common elements that make up a well-designed web site. And most importantly - spiders love site maps. Love them!

With a site map in place, you provide all of the links the spider needs to index every page of your site. This cuts down significantly on mis- and partial indexing problems because the spider sees every page.

There's another important benefit to a site map. Spiders visit a site regularly. Google spiders at least once every two weeks. Yahoo claims it spiders all sites every 48 hours. In either case, you're going to get visited and assessed regularly. That's a good thing because it enables you to make a better, clearer impression of your site with each spider visit.

The additional benefit is this: with a site map, spiders are able to locate and index new site content faster and more reliably. You add a couple of new articles or some new products to your offerings and there's no guarantee that a spider will pick up this new content on its next visit. However, with a site map to provide directions, spiders will pick up, assess and index new content much faster than when left to their own, mindless devices.

The Bottom Line is Your Bottom Line

More complete indexing, more accurate indexing and easier, faster detection of new content - that's what a site map delivers to improve any site's SEO. And don't forget, visitors rely on these navigation tools just as much as spiders so a site map is a win-win-win proposition. Visitors win with easier navigation, spiders win because you've made their job easier and you, the site owner, win with improved SEO for virtually no out-of-pocket expense.

So, add a site map today. Link all of the content on your site to one page and provide spiders and visitors with the means to improve your e-commerce venture's bottom line. It's free and it works.

It's too simple not to take this valuable step so do it - today!