Improve Your Rankings with a Sitemap That Works: The HTML - Building the Sitemap Content
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Now for every directory in your site structure, you want a main heading. Below this you can list the pages that reside in that folder. A simple un-ordered list will do; theoretically you could use a table with no impact on your ranking, but a table should only be used to display data in a tabular format, and as this is not a list of figures or prices or amounts, it doesn’t strictly fall in to the category of data. For proper form and accessibility compliance, I’d avoid the use of a table to display links
Using this structure instead of a table can help reduce the amount of unnecessary tags that can dilute your content. Similarly, staying away from deprecated presentational tags like <font> etc, can also prevent this happening.
A list is more than adequate for our needs with this page. Heading text is viewed by some spiders as slightly more important that normal body text so enclosing the link text within a heading may help to improve your ranking slightly:
<h1 title="Vinyl available in house, techno, drum & bass, hardcore, UK garage, hip hop and more">Browse the different styles of Dance Music We Sell</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://house.htm"><h2>House – The staple of Dance Music</h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://techno.htm"><h2>Techno – Hard and Fast Dance Music </h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://drumnbass.htm"><h2>Drum & Bass – The Sound of The Underground</h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://hardcore.htm"><h2>Hardcore – A Foundation of the UK Rave Scene</h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://ukgarage.htm"><h2>UK Garage – Fashionable Urban Music</h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://hiphop.htm"><h2>Hip Hop – The Catalyst of all Dance Music</h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://randb.htm"><h2>R & B – Mellow, Soulful Rhythm & Blues</h2></a></li>
<li><a href="http://randb.htm"><h2>NU School Breaks- An underground blend of House and Drum & Base</h2></a></li>
</ul>
The text used within link elements is also viewed by some search bots as important so placing keywords here can also yield better results. Additionally, it is often thought that crawlers treat information nearer the top of the page with more importance, and sometimes the end of a page may not even be reached. For this reason it is best to place your most important directory at the top of the sitemap; as this web site is for a record shop, selling records is going to be its prime function and hence, the directory containing the pages of vinyl is the first section on the sitemap.
As you should design your web site with consistency in mind, your navigation model should reflect the layout of your site map, and the section that comes first in the site map would be the first link in your navigation bar. This isn’t strictly an SEO technique, just a practice you should follow for usability reasons.
The heading one tag includes a title attribute that can be used to add some more keywords to the site map. Keywords would normally be carefully chosen and used within the content of a page, but because a site map contains very little actual content, you have to add them in where you can. Your links should conform to your page titles as near as can possibly be achieved, and should therefore already have been optimized by you. The text used for a link is seen as of a greater importance than normal body text by some spiders, so it should also contain some keywords. The golden rule here is not to over do it however; the merest hint of blatant keyword stuffing or spamming will get you the exact opposite of what you are trying to achieve.
Next: Finishing the HTML >>
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