The Site Map – Very crucial

In the old days of the internet experts exclaimed every site should have a site map. From their ivory tower, they announced the site map as the over-the-top method to control potential customers could easily navigate the site and find what they needed. Once they found it, they’d buy it and you would be rich, rich, rich!

As is typical with such universally received proclamations, this one was wrong. Anyone remotely with attention to server statistics realized very few people were visiting site maps. The proclamation stopped being shouted and evolved into criticisms of sites which still have site maps. These criticisms, of course, also miss the mark.

HTML site maps are primitive. Visitors to your site will almost never use them. You may even forget you have one. You’ll certainly forget to update it as often as you should. Still, the site map is a critical component of the site.

The first thing to realize is there’s a specific aim for having a site map. The purpose is to make it is as simple as possible for search engine robots to crawl your site. The more pages indexed by the search engines, the better off you are.

To create a site map, just make a page with the meta tag of “site map”. Add hyperlinked text to each fulcrum page of the site. A fulcrum page is simply a gateway page to a particular section of the site. For example, you may have a centralized article page with links to each article. The centralized article page is a fulcrum page and should be included on the site map. Once completed, make sure that every page you want included in the SE has a hyperlinked text headline on at least one of the fulcrum pages.

A quick word about Google. Google has a new xml feature you can use for a site map. You can use it or forgo it as you see fit. Still, make sure to make an html site map for the other search engines.

Once you have the site map page up, don’t wait for the search engine robots to find it. Publish the link in an article byline or blog as soon as possible. Within a week or so, you should see pages from your site being added to the search engine indexes. This is true for Google even if you don’t use the xml site map tool.

Common sense suggests that the first step in designing a website is…to design the site! In this case, common sense takes a fall. The last step in starting a website is the design. The first step is to research. The second is using the research to create a layout. The third step is planning out your optimization. Then, and only then, should the website be built. Let’s take a closer look.

Research is all about figuring out what keywords your prospects are using on the web. Keywords are simply the phrase being typed into search engines for various subjects. For example, the keyword phrase on this page is “website designing and optimization” and a couple hundred people type it into search engines each day. The best tool for research is Wordtracker.. Before you go running off to do research, however, we need to discuss how to use it.

Undoubtedly, you have a very strong opinion about what your prospects are searching for and want. You are undoubtedly wrong. Sorry, but it has been proven over and over again. People type in the strangest things when searching for things on the web. You should use Wordtracker to identify the exact phrases being typed. You should then look for trends. As those trends appear, you should start laying out your site. Each trend should have its own section on the site. Don’t fight the results of the research. You want to sell to your prospects, so make sure your site layout matches the subjects they are looking for on the net.

Optimizing your site is not the easiest of tasks. In fact, it goes well beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless, the important thing to realize is that you must have an optimization plan in place before the site is built. Optimization techniques are like the electrical wiring in a skyscraper. Once they are in place, it takes a lot of effort, time and money to change them. Get it right from the outset. Once you do that, you are ready to actually build your site.

Website designing and optimization should be done in concert with one another. If you can avoid building a site before even thinking about optimization, you will be far ahead of most sites on the web.