Seeking Site Map Suggestions

[onlinemarketingdude]

Hi everyone,

We're adding a site map to our site and I was wondering if anyone has some general advice and guidelines for maximizing the benefit of the site map for both SEO and our users.

Some specific questions I have include:

Does format or organization make a difference?

Should the site map page have meta tags like the other pages?

Is there anything I need to do (other than added a link to the homepage) to ensure the engines find and indexz the site map?

Any good articles or products you could refer me to?

Thanks in advance!!

[scottiecl]

Hi onlinemarketingdude!

When building your sitemap, the homepage should link to it- it's a very good idea to work the sitemap link into the navigation elements on every page so that a user can access it from any point in the site.

Also a good idea to include a some text with each link with a few details about the page. It helps both humans and spiders to determine what the page is about.

[chopsticks]

* Name the page 'sitemap.html' or 'sitemap.asp', etc.
* Link the page from the footer of every main page you have (with the simple TEXT hyperlink of "Sitemap")
* Make sure the title of the page has the word "SITEMAP"

* Yes, META tags aren't a bad thing, but they won't be as important as the first three items above.

* Think about the disabled (blind) users out there on the world wide web. If you design the sitemap for those without sight (and, thus, they'd be using screen readers -- one could call it a "NoSight-Map") you should be golden!

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/HTML.html
http://www.seotoolbox.com/htmlchat/tables_layout.html

[Blue]

If you do a search in these forums, you should come up with some posts that have good examples.