or perform any other type of online
user interaction that might be used by a human visitor. Robots are able to
index the text on a page and click through hypertext links. For this reason,
adding navigational text links to your web pages (often located at the bottom of
the page) provides the search engine robots with another means to click through
the links of your web pages when it cannot access these other types of
navigation.
No matter how great your JavaScript menu system is, the
search engine robots can't 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 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 on 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 site map page here too.
Site maps
A site map page is a supercharged version of the bottom-of-the-page hypertext
links. The site map provides 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.
A good site map 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 site map 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, add a site map for your visitors and for the
search engine robots.
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'll 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 favourably listed in
their search results.
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