SEO is a big determinant of how high your site ranks in search engine results pages. Making sure your site is spider-friendly can help visitors discover your site and your blog more easily.

Search engine spiders “crawl” your pages to find out what’s on your site and to categorize it for placement in search engine results. Creating a site map is one very easy way to make sure that the search engine spiders can reach each page in your site. Site maps are most often created for the benefit of a search engine, but visitors find them useful, too. Well-constructed, spider-friendly site maps help the search engine find all of the interior pages of your site and index them for later retrieval.

A complete site map is a single page that contains an HTML link to every other page on your site. Site maps are rarely beautiful. Instead, they’re simple pages that lay out a logical connection to each interior page. Organization and HTML links are the most significant requirements for a simple site map. If your site map contains these, you’re in good shape.

Providing a site map benefits your human visitors because they can quickly find the information or interior pages they’re looking for. Most visitors won’t look at your site map. Instead, they’ll prefer to navigate your site using the navigational aids you’ve built into your site. For some visitors, however, a site map provides a clear option to locate and access a particular page on your site.

The site map will be examined in great detail by a search engine spider, so making the page as spider-friendly as possible is important. You can tailor your keyword optimization strategies carefully and get those optimized pages into the search engine fast.

Site maps can also extend the page rank your home page enjoys to the rest of your site, provided that your site map is linked off of your top-level page. Spider behavior also provides a good reason to integrate your blog into your own Web site instead of having it hosted elsewhere. An integrated blog can take better advantage of site rankings.

The takeaway here is that a site map, while not much to look at for your human visitors, is an essential component of your Web site and can help get your entire site indexed quickly and regularly!

Photo Credit: Melissa W.