Why use a Sitemap?

We want to use a sitemap for two reasons. One, to provide an overview to your website to your customers and Two, to help the web crawlers catalog your links. To help your viewers you can simply provide the standard sitemap html file that lists all your links (also called a traditional map). Or you can create a special XML file often capitalized as "Sitemap" that provides information to the search engine spiders (google documentation).

"Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site." - sitemap.org



http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly
0.8



The downside of using the XML Sitemap is that we are not listing anchor text to be used as keyword associations. So for modest sized websites we might prefer to use a simple html file that lists all your links with appropriate keyword anchor text. Another advantage to the html sitemap is that it levels a site to 2 or 3 levels.

Technorati Profile

Technorati Profile

Open Directory Project Categories

You may have tried to get your website listed in ODP and found that you had difficulty finding the right category for your site. I know I had the problem when attempting to list Ceboa, an online suite of tools for expensing and invoicing. One easy way to determine your category is to first go to Google Directory. Once you are there you can enter a keyword expression that best represents what a prospective client might use to find your service in google. I entered "invoice software" to start. The returned results listed a number of websites each with a category line that looks like
Category: Computers > Software > Accounting > Billing This link takes you to a page listing similar websites all with the same category. Now if you look at these sites and they are similar to what your site does - then you can use the link at the bottom of the page to "Submit a Site" on ODP. If the listed websites are very different than yours then you might try a different keyword search term to find the right fit. Being able to justify why your website fits into a particular category is an important factor in getting listed.

SEO Site Architecture

In order to rank high in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) there needs to be a great site architecture that is loaded with keywords and phrases. You can silo subsets of information into sub-folders or sub-domains. For example, expense related information could be accessed at http://www.ceboa.com/expense or using a sub-domain strategy at http://expense.ceboa.com. The pages in the silo should be named as keyword phrases such as http://www.ceboa.com/expense/track-expenses.html. In a nutshell - its good to have a lot of well named content.