Effective website sitemap and hyperlinks.

No matter how great your JavaScript menu system is, the search engine robots cannot use it. They can follow plain old hyperlinks, and that's about it. Since the ability to move around on your site is vital to the search engine robots successful indexing of your content, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to visit all of your pages. Use of text links at the bottom of your pages, while hardly cutting edge, is one of the best ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around your site. Be sure to include links to your site's principal pages on all the pages in your site. Always remember to put a link to your sitemap page here too.

Sitemaps

A site map page is a supercharged version of the bottom of the page hypertext links. The sitemap provides spider food for a hungry search engine robot. A site map page will at very least have links to all of the major pages on your site. Depending on the size of your site, it may actually link to all of your pages. This means that once the robot gets to the site map page, it can visit every page on your entire site. Having all of the content of your site included in the search engine database is a good thing: you are much more likely to come up in the search engine results when somebody is performing a search related to your topic.

1. Build your own site map | 2. Google site maps

A good sitemap will...

Provide text links to at least the most important pages on your site; depending on the size of the site, it may have links to every page.
Give a short explanation of each page on your site, to inform your visitors about your website.
Give your visitors the information they need when lost in your website, and show them how to reach the page they are looking for.
Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important pages.
Provide important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links that help the automated search engine robot understand what the page is about.
Help search engine robots find static landing pages that then link to dynamically generated pages they may not otherwise find.
Even if your website is small, adding a site map for your visitors and for the search engine robots is suggested and part of the overall search engine optimization strategy.

To make your site map most attractive to the search engine robots and your human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. Use your keywords in that text, including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link. Be careful not to overuse your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized in the rankings. Remember that this is a map that will be used by both search engine robots and your human visitors. If the content of the page makes sense to the people who visit your site, chances are it will make sense to the visiting robots as well.

When you make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for. When you make it easy to search engine robots to move around on your site, you increase your chances of being favorably listed in their search results.

1. Build your own site map | 2. Google site maps

About the Author
Steve Szasz is the founder and Managing Director of WebSeo+Plus, a web based information site about website promotion and marketing in Australia. See http://www.webseo.com.au

Site maps and hyperlinks- is becoming search engine friendly!