Design in Context: A Web Design Blog by Greg Kihlstrom

Site Maps for SEO

You might have noticed that a lot of sites you visit, even some of the smaller ones, have a little link somewhere, maybe towards the top right or bottom right, that says "Site Map."  On larger sites, this is very useful for us humans that tend to go through sites by "browsing" (as opposed to searching or taking shots in the dark by clicking on navigation elements).

Site maps are actually pretty useful to Search Engine spiders as well, because most of the automated "robots" that scour the Web looking for new content actually behave like humans that are browsing a site, clicking various links on a page.  Having one page that is linked right off the home page with a complete directory of a Web site makes it much easier for these robots to properly index your entire site.

It's also helpful if you have a large number of dynamically served pages that might be hard to get to otherwise.

Title: The little tag that makes a huge SEO difference

If you read much on Search Engine Optimization, you will no doubt run into something <title> and META tags, and if you don't, you're not reading from the right places.

The <title> tag is what determines what shows up in the top of the browser window.  For instance, on this page, the <title> tag starts with "Design in Context:..."

It's very important to use correct <title> tags for 2 reasons:

1. The title tag can contain keywords that will help your page get ranked well for search terms you want to be found under. In fact, the title tag is generally considered a more important "tag" than the other META keyword and description tags, though those 2 (especially the description tag, which I'll discuss in another post) should not be ignored.

2. Having unique title tags on your pages help a Search Engine spider tell how many different pages there are on your site.

#1 is fairly self-explanatory, but #2 is a little more complicated.  Title tags are not the only way that Search Engine Spiders tell what pages are on your site, but if you have duplicate title tags on all your pages, you can sometimes confuse them.  There are many other ways to help get all the pages on your site indexed , but having unique title tags is a great practice to follow.