You may not think there's a connection between proper search engine optimization and site maps, but you'd be surprised. Think about what might happen to a visitor of your site. If he gets lost he may go looking for your Sitemap link, and if you’re a good designer you’ll have one for him. Not only do human visitors like sitemaps, so do search engines and there lies another ingenious way to beat your competitors in search rankings.

Search Engine Optimization, remember, has everything to do with both your human customers and the search engine spiders as well. In fact, while the code that search engines use to seek out and index your site is quite complex, what they’re actually looking for is the same thing as your visitors: good relevant content.

So where do site maps come into play with search engine optimization? Well, a number of places actually but probably the most important thing is the simple fact that a sitemap tells the search engine spider what your site looks like and it does so by holding its hand all the way through and up and down your site.

You’ve surely already discovered that anchor links (those usually blue underlined ones that lurk within content paragraphs) should be keyword rich and logically named.

For example, an anchor link

Now imagine that ALL of your sites pages are appropriately named, all of them keyword rich and logically named for your human visitors. When you put all of these into your sitemap page, search engine spiders will “read” every single one of them. They’ll find all of your aptly named pages in all of their keyword splendor and index them exactly as such.

So…long story short, when people search for content in Google, for example, your site could come up because one of your pages is optimized and named for that particular subject. You might not have ever even manually submitted that page to Google, but because you gave Googlebot (the spider that searches your site) a site map and all those tasty names, he knows exactly where to find what your customer is looking for.

Instant gratification, both for the search engine and your customer as well.

C. Pabst is an author, entrepreneur and the owner of Work From Home Businesses. He is also the creator of the revolutionary money-making system Internet Triple Header, based on simple, applicable and practical concepts, not positive thinking or luck.

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