Sitemap

After your initial keyword research, developing a sitemap is the first thing you should do before you begin to code or design your website. A good sitemap is essential to your seo. Without it you will flounder around, creating pages here and there, not quite going in any specific direction, possibly duplicating previous ideas, creating an unstructured linking system, veering off topic, and simply getting jumbled up.

What is a sitemap? Many web developers would describe the sitemap as the one page on a site with links to each page on the entire website. This is true, and a very important piece of the site. But this post will discuss the sitemap in its raw form, the auctual mapping out of the site piece by piece. If thought out, researched and developed properly, the sitemap will turn the large task of creating a website from the ground up into a logical, straightforward process.

After doing some initial keyword research, and defining some long tail keywords you would like to target throughout your site, you can begin to form your sitemap. When I first began developing sitemaps I would draw them out on a big piece of paper, my main site concept keyword in the center with spokes shooting out and long tail keywords at the end. Before I even began researching and writing content there would be at least 10 long tail keywords, with descent search volume, shooting out from my main site concept. Then one by one I would start knocking them down, aka researching and writing each page. I would often realize that a few of my long tails would support long tails of their own, so I would then add some spokes coming off of that concept and then create that content. As you can see, developing a sitemap in this manner is brainstorming at its best.

A sitemap will lead you through the development process, it will eventually lead your site visitors through your site in a logical manner, and it will not only lead Googlebot easily through your site, it will provide the little spider with the keywords and phrases necessary for indexing and placement in the search engines.