Make your site easier to navigate
The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google’s search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.
Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? The directory A sitemap (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site.
Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it’s mainly aimed at human visitors.
Using a Sitemap file is also one way (though not guaranteed) to tell Google which version of a URL you’d prefer as the canonical one (e.g. http:// or http://www.
About Sitemaps
In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your siteāoften by sectionāand is meant to help users find the information they need.
XML Sitemapsāusually called Sitemaps, with a capital Sāare a way for you to give Google information about your site.
In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
- Your site has dynamic content.
- Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
- Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:
- How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
- The date each page was last modified.
- The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.
ā¢ Create a naturally flowing hierarchy – Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure.
Avoid:
ā¢ creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page
ā¢ going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (it takes twenty clicks to get to deep content)
ā¢ Use mostly text for navigation – Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Many users also prefer this over other approaches, especially on some devices that might not handle Flash or JavaScript.
Avoid:
ā¢ having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations (many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site
ā¢ Use “breadcrumb” navigation – A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right.
Put an HTML sitemap page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file – A simple sitemap page with links to all of the pages or the most important pages (if you have hundreds or thousands) on your site can be useful. Creating an XML Sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site.
Avoid:
ā¢ letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
ā¢ creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject
ā¢ Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL – Some users might navigate your site in odd ways, and you should anticipate this. For example, instead of using the breadcrumb links on the page, a user might drop off a part of the URL in the hopes of finding more general content. He or she might be visiting
ā¢ Have a useful 404 page – Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn’t exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user’s experience. Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site. Google provides a 404 widget that you can embed in your 404 page to automatically populate it with many useful features.
You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to find the sources of URLs causing “not found” errors.
Avoid:
ā¢ allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent pages are requested)
ā¢ providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404″, or no 404 page at all
ā¢ using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site
Useful Links
http://www.answers.com/topic/sitemaps
Google Webmaster tools
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