You Need More Than One Site Map - HTML Site Map to Help Human Visitors
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The first one of course is the easiest and most known by web site owners, web designers, and web programmers. Unless you are a very experienced web site designer, web programmer or Internet marketer, however, chances are that you do not know how to properly create the perfect navigation to direct all of your traffic to the right areas of your site (these are usually the section where you sell your products and/or services).
In another article of mine, "Why A C-Navigation," I go into more depth on how to structure and implement this "perfect navigation." For the purposes of this article I will only be explaining how to make up for not having this.
The truth of the matter is, even with a "perfect" navigation plan you still cannot guarantee that all of your web traffic will use your site in the same way. Typically, your site is designed to your wants and needs and possibly to your employees' wants and needs as well; rarely will it fulfill the needs of every one of your visitors. Some may have trouble finding certain products, or information and service pages, resulting in a loss of a potential sale and even a future client or customer.
Your human-readable, text version site map is the solution to this problem. A well-organized Site Map that illustrates the important areas of your global site and breaks them up clearly into an understandable order, will bring traffic to even your deepest page links. It will also come in handy if you have broken links within your site that you are unaware of or have not had the chance to resolve yet.
The final advantage to having a text-based site map is that it gives you another opportunity to display your keyword phrases, embedded within these links. Internet marketers and SEOs know that in order to be indexed for certain keywords, they must be displayed multiple times throughout the site and not all in the same general area. Having your keyword phrases displayed directly in the link name will greatly increase the chances of ranking fore these keywords in many of the top search engines' indexes.
A healthy, human-readable and text-based site map will become your visitors' best friend for any navigational confusion, problems with programming, and keyword-phrase positioning.
Next: ROR Site Maps for All Search Engines >>
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