Marketing Defined

How to Use a Site Map to maximise Link Strategy

A Site Map is a key element to expert search engine optimization and a necessary ingredient of a webmaster’s overall plan to maximise the benefits of their link strategy.

The recent series in this Blog on Increase Website Traffic Tips and Expert SEO Tips will be compounded by the next few Posts encompassing an effective Link Strategy.

If you haven’t downloaded Brad Callen’s free PDF on Expert SEO tips available for “nothing” or free to easily increase targeted traffic to your website, it is available to you at the above URL on: Expert SEO Tips.

An effective Link strategy/Off Page optimization is an often neglected key to gaining high search engine rankings and apart from the obvious goal of gaining related back links to a website or blog, the inclusion of a Site Map and expert interlinking of a website’s internal pages [using keyword optimized anchor text in the hyperlink] must be included in any Webmaster’s overall search engine optimization plan.

Kristy Harris [an Attorney from the USA who is currently posted in Singapore] .. is a colleague and Marketing Defined blog subscriber. Kristy verifies what a Site Map did for her business after following recent advice on the importance of including a Site Map:

Testimonial:
Interesting to note… I added a Site Map to my main pages after your post Site Maps Crucial to SEO .. I have still to get them up for my blog, but in two days my SE saturation has increased from 45+ links to over 300 on MSN.
Kristy Harris Far Flung Crafts

User Satisfaction

User satisfaction should be your central aim when designing a site layout. Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors, and decide what you want from your website.

It is a subtle shift in perception, but it will help you decide whether you really need all those extra menu options on the left or if the design could be simplified by placing those extra links at the bottom of the page; out of immediate view, thus reducing clutter and confusion but within reach if the user needs extra information.

A good site layout will improve the image of your website. Don’t just think about search engine rankings… keep your users as your first priority and ensure that your visitors do not go away without being impressed by the clarity and simplicity of your design.

Word-of mouth marketing [either through natural linking or plain blog and forum activity] is a power marketing tool that is largely based on how user-friendly and helpful your website actually is.

Site Map:

A Site Map has been widely proclaimed as the basic linking tool for site-wide search engine optimization, and with good reason. It presents your website’s content and the linking structure of your website on one single page for search engines and users alike.

Accessibility

Your Site Map is something like a table of contents for your website.  While not the first resort for users looking for information on websites, today’s increasingly-aware user audience will more and more turn to a site map if they cannot find something on your website through the traditional menu structure, or if they need to get somewhere really quickly.

Search Engines

A Site Map, properly mapped and linked from your home page, is the search engine’s guide to the depth and breadth of your website. When a search engine spider finally decides that your site is interesting [read important] enough to be indexed further, it will start by exploring links on your home page.

Through the site map, it gains immediate one-link access to your complete website, and this greatly speeds up the indexing of all your pages.

Even when the spider does not engage in a deep crawl, a two-level initial crawl is not uncommon, and that will invariably give the spider the opportunity to see all the pages.

For examples of good site maps, check out the following site maps:

Google Site Map
eBay Site Map
Apple Site Map

Optimal Indexing

To ensure that your website is optimally indexed, there are some specific linking strategies that you need to follow. It is NOT as difficult as you might expect. At the very basic level, there are two things you must take care of.

Template-based Web Design:
Design your templates before you start the designing of your website. Using templates to add new pages to your website, will not only bring in consistency, but also allow you to standardize the optimal pattern of in-site linking. For example using a Magazine style WP theme on a blog will certainly entice/draw your visitors deep into your site.

This might sound terribly complicated unless you base all pages on a template. With a well-designed template the process is simplified to just updating the placeholder hyperlinks. Then create sub-templates for categories of pages (main category pages, subcategory pages, etc.) to further ease your burden of reconfiguring each page manually.

Site Structure:
A template-based design should, apart from speeding up the design process, focus on optimizing your site-wide linking. This will not only with indexing, but also help in increasing SERPS placement due to extra inbound links for your important pages.

Base your site structure on solid, site-wide linking strategies like these:

• Each page should link back to the home page
• Each page should further link back to its main category page
• Each category page should provide clear links to any sub categories

If possible, each page should have the main menu structure – so as to give maximum link exposure to the most important pages of your website.

Each page should further link to those important pages on your website that do not have any clear category (privacy policy, Help section, user guide, search page, members section, etc.).

If your template is properly designed and as mentioned earlier you specialize your template into sub-templates, your site structure will become more defined and manageable, and your linking strategy will help in both improving the search engine indexing and increasing your rankings.

Reality Check:
Don’t spend more time than necessary on site structure and optimizing your linking process. The important thing here is to automate as much as possible, and to plan thoroughly. However, simply arranging your site with a basic linking strategy and a detailed site map is enough for your indexing optimization.

As for search engine rankings, use your linking strategy to help you get that extra edge, but don’t depend on it. Inbound links from other websites are much more valuable [which will be covered in depth together with an optimal interlinking strategy for your webpages, in the next few Posts on this Blog]

Benefits of CSS

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, have rapidly become main-stream for their ability to separate style and formatting from the content. There is a wealth of very useful material on CSS on the Internet – for now I’ll just tell you how they can help your site design.

Separating Style from Content - The aim of Style Sheets was to aggregate the style elements common to the whole site
into one, single, easily accessible location. The results are nothing short of spectacular; if used properly, you can change the whole design of a website (even those with thousands of pages) by altering just one page. CSS is also a great way to standardize your site design.

Of course, like all design tools, CSS is much better used when it is part of your website design from the very beginning. You can use separate style sheets for content pages, category pages and your main page, or use the same style sheet for all your pages.

Whatever division you end up choosing, the advantages of CSS more than justify making the effort to understand how it works.

Parts of the above Post are attributed to Brad Callen,

We have just covered Site Maps as part of an overall Linking Strategy.

How to apply an effective Link Strategy [for both inbound links and 'expert' linking within your website] .. to your search engine optimization effort, in order to Increase targeted free website Traffic, will be covered in-depth .. in the next few Marketing Defined Posts.

Technorati Tags:
SEO, Links, Link Strategy