Guiding You Through

The actual Site Map for this web­site, is presen­ted lower down this page.

A website’s Site Map is essen­tially a ded­ic­ated web page on the web­site that presents text links to all the main sec­tions or pages within it in a hier­arch­ical arrangement.

Present­ing links to a site’s pages allows Users of the web­site to quickly go to any page or sec­tion of the site without hav­ing to use the site’s main menu or any internal site-search facil­ity that may exist on the website.

For example, the page you are read­ing now is this website’s “Site Map” page. Note how you can nav­ig­ate to all the major pages on the site from their respect­ive links.

Yes we real­ise this page also con­tains a use­ful art­icle and defin­i­tion about the nature of Site Maps; but we’re sure you’ll agree that in present­ing this art­icle on this page; we’ve also given the page some addi­tional interest to you, our website’s User.

Clearly, as can be seen from this site’s map below: our own web­site isn’t very large so you may think “What’s the Point?”.

That’s a valid ques­tion, how­ever it’s gen­er­ally accep­ted by many SEO pro­fes­sion­als and Inter­net con­sultan­cies alike (ourselves included), that not only is it good prac­tice from a Useab­il­ity point of view to include a Site Map within a web­site so that Users have an easy to use method of nav­ig­at­ing the web­site, but also from a search-engine’s per­spect­ive; as it allows the search-engine spiders or robots to eas­ily find and then crawl, each page or sec­tion on a par­tic­u­lar website.

The easier you make it for the SEs to crawl your site, the quicker it will get indexed and the quicker it’ll start show­ing up in the Search Engine Res­ults Pages (SERPS).

Mak­ing a Site Map for Your Website

Con­struct­ing a web­site map for your site is a rel­at­ively straight for­ward exer­cise if you have a small static HTML site (of say up to 50 pages).

In this case you manu­ally add a text page link for each page on your site to your Site Map page. How­ever, if your site has a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) or data­base driven shop­ping cart where pages are cre­ated “on-the-fly”; poten­tially your web­site could have 1000’s of pages.

Clearly, cre­at­ing a“static” Site Map manu­ally in this case is a very labor­i­ous pro­cess at the out­set and is very time-consuming to keep updated on an ongo­ing basis as new pages are cre­ated and old pages are deleted from your site auto­mat­ic­ally by your site’s CMS. In situ­ations like this, talk to your web­site developers or Inter­net mar­ket­ing con­sult­ants about deploy­ing a “Dynamic Site Map”.

A Dynamic Site Map is a fixed web page on a web­site that presents a Site Map in the man­ner described above i.e. hier­archal text links to a site’s pages.

How­ever, instead of cre­at­ing each text link manu­ally, they are cre­ated “dynam­ic­ally” or “on-the-fly” by the site’s CMS data­base as pages are cre­ated or deleted on the site. Site Maps cre­ated in this man­ner sat­isfy the need to present a Site Map to its User’s and the search engine spiders, whilst offer­ing the web­site owner a self-up date­able site-map.

How a Site Map Helps with
Search Engine Optim­isa­tion (SEO)

Many cli­ents with an exist­ing web­site employ us to dis­cover why their site hasn’t been effect­ively indexed by the Search Engine spiders.

One of the first things we look at when try­ing to resolve the issue is look for the avail­ab­il­ity of a Site Map on the website.

A well con­struc­ted Site Map will give the search-engine spiders an easy gate­way (or “map”) dir­ectly into the pages of a web­site. Without a site-map, SE spiders will find all the pages on a web­site even­tu­ally, how­ever if the site’s con­struc­tion offers ‘bar­ri­ers’ to the SE spiders the task becomes all that more dif­fi­cult. Adding a Site Map aids the pro­cess of crawl­ing for the SE spiders and can help solve a mul­ti­tude of index­ing problems.

Site Map

• Home Page. The main entry point for our web­site and any­one inter­ested in using an Inter­net mar­ket­ing con­sult­ant to improve their own website.
• What We Do. An over­view of what our busi­ness does and how we do it. The ser­vices we provide related to web­site man­age­ment, online mar­ket­ing and SEO con­sultancy ser­vices and the types of cli­ents we work with.
• Our Cli­ents. Some examples of our recent pro­jects, what we did for the cli­ent and how they benefited from our services.
• About Us. Our pro­file and background.
• Con­tact Us. Feed­back form and how you can make an enquiry with our busi­ness regard­ing our Inter­net Con­sultancy Services.
  • News­let­ter Unsub­scribe. If you’ve sub­scribed to our mail­ing list and wish to unsub­scribe auto­mat­ic­ally, you may do so from this page.
• Blog. Get some insights into our views on the world and read art­icles that offer free advice on the man­age­ment and pro­mo­tion of your own website.
• Busi­ness Terms and Con­di­tions. Our trad­ing terms and con­di­tions i.e. the con­di­tions under which we offer our inter­net and web­site man­age­ment con­sultancy services.
• Site Map. This site-map page.