Lab Lateral

 

What are Site maps?
There is more than one answer to this when talking about SEO sitemaps.

On site site map
This is a page on your website which lists all the pages on your websites. Normally the Page Title tags are used, and they operate as hyperlinks to those pages. As the Page Titles should have been optimised for keyword rich content, this is also a useful way to produce a page brimming with keywords which are all defined to the spiders as important (because they are hyperlinks).

Bit like a breadcrumb trail then?
In a way: that is a line of text, visible on every page, that shows you where you are within the site's navigation, for example Home>Online Marketing>Sitemaps. These are also coded as hyperlinks both to improve navigation and for SEO purposes that, by now, should need no further explanation.
 
Root level site map
This is a file containing a list of all the pages on your site, and it's used by spiders to find out what pages there are on your site, plus a couple of other bits of information, like how old they are or when they were last updated. It is usually saved as an xml file at the root level of the site and is not normally accessible to a website user. It is also submitted to search engines by webmasters in order to provide information about changes to the site.
 
Generating a sitemap.xml
There are plenty of free-to-use websites available to help with this: just make sure that the one you use is going to produce an xml file compliant with the Search Engine in question.

Is that the lot?
Kind of: you might be asked to draw up a site map when you are designing a site, using wireframes or a tool like Mindmapper or Visio.

Oh, and you might need one to find where to pitch your tent.

 

For more information or advice about how Lab Lateral can improve, manage and develop your website optimisation through search engine site map submissions & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), contact our Surrey based Online Marketing team on 01483 60 80 60.