Viralogy

Regardless of how great you think your website is, without a sitemap, visitors, including search engine crawlers might not find everything they are looking for on your site. For an eCommerce site, an easy way to think of what a sitemap can do for one’s site is to think about each of the sites pages as treasure. While some ‘treasures’ are easier to find than others, it’s not a guarantee that you will be able to find all of them. Sitemap change this and give Google and search engines directions on where to find pages you want to get indexed.

What Makes A Good Sitemap

While there are many differing opinions on what makes for a ‘perfect’ sitemap, here are a few pointers are commonly seen as best practice for sitemaps:

• A websites sitemap should be located on the simplest page of the website
• A good sitemap will be informative in the sense that a visitor will be able to figure out what each page will direct them to
• Site maps should not lead users on a wild goose chase. Site maps should direct users to the page that they are looking for.
• Site maps that utilize text links should use anchor tags and keywords within the TITLE attribute
• Site maps should be able to ‘guide’ search engine crawlers to all the appropriate pages of your site. Be sure to only includes pages that you want indexed.

eCommerce Site Tips

eCommerce can especially benefit from site maps as most users that land on an eCommerce site sometimes have trouble finding what they are looking for unless the site has some sort of product recommendations. Here are a few tips that can be useful for eCommerce sites in particular:

• Update regularly: Always make sure that your site map is current and reflects any changes that may have been made to your eCommerce site such as new categories being added or a group of products being moved/phased out.
• Include descriptions with your site map: This can help shoppers on your site have a better idea of where things may be on your site if they are new visitors.
• Limit your links: Although an eCommerce site can sometimes have a large number of pages on their site, it is best to keep your sitemap to 25-40 links.