Site Maps: A Workaround
Site maps are a great workaround for many of the issues mentioned earlier. They can help a site owner as follows:
• A site map brings more of your deep levels of content to higher levels of your site. Your home page (Level 1) links to your site map page (Level 2). Your site map page links to every important page on your site, thus making those pages Level 3. Using text links that are keyword rich is a good idea for the site map.
• If you have a JavaScript, Flash, Java, or graphical menu system, the site map can ensure your site is indexed. This is not an optimal solution from an SEO point of view. One of the problems is that you end up with just one page linking to the whole site, and minimal other internal links. It does work though.
• If a page is only "linked to" once in your site, a site map can provide a secondary link and ensure that it gets indexed. The search engines look at the links going to a page to see if it’s relevant to index or not. If there is only one link to the page and that’s from a very deep page, they may decide to index something else. If there are two links, you've just doubled the link count to the page, making the page more likely to be indexed. In addition, a link from the site map makes most of the pages of your site "Level 3" deep, thus raising a page that might be six or more clicks from the home page and raising its relevancy.
So submit your sitemap today at Live Search Webmaster Center.
Thanks to SEMPO institute for this information.
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