Date created: 22 August 2004

If you’re having problems getting your whole site indexed then you should add a search engine friendly site map to your site. You’ll need a site map when:

• Your site menu is flash or pure javascript (most rollover scripts are OK if they use ‘<a href’ links).
• Your menu structure is more than 3 levels deep.
• Some of your content is not getting indexed and it is publicly readable i.e. not behind a fire wall, login isn’t required, etc.
• You want to provide some ‘Spider Bait’ i.e. optimized link text.

Whatever your reason (or for no reason) a site map will not hurt your search engine position and may help.

A site map consists of anchor links (<a href>) links pointing to every page in your site. If you’re an eCommerce site this would include all product pages and all category pages; if you’re a general information site then every article would be indexed. It might be necessary to set up more than one site map if your site is large enough.

The text of the link should be the search phrase you want the target page found for. Use the product name, a key search phrase, etc.

Once your site map is built you will want to link to it from all pages using a standard anchor link (<a href>), this link is usually put at the bottom of the page as it’s not designed to be part of the main navigation. The reason you want all pages is to provide visibility to the site map from any landing page so that it’s useful to your human visitors as well as the automated variety.