Archive for April, 2007

April 28th, 2007 - Sitemap Best Practices

Here’s the original draft of this article that appeared in BizTech Magazine.

You will find two different sitemaps representing the Stephen Hawking website on the internet. Far from parallel universes, one is a utilitarian collection of links that represents the hierarchical structure of his website. The other is pure eye-candy – a stylistic collection of images and graphical pathways illustrating all the dimensions of the physicist’s life, career, and writing.

At some point the site owner (assumedly not Mr. Hawking himself, though I bet he’d be awesome with cascading style sheets) reviewed both and chose one over the other. Score one for simplicity and none for aesthetics, because the stylistic version rests on an obscure domain, essentially unused, while the other is accessed each day by many Hawking devotees. In making this decision, the site administrators likely surmised that the image-rich sitemap, while visually impressive, is hampered by search engine indexing and site maintenance flaws. When it comes to sitemaps, function usually trumps form.

Sitemaps have traditionally served a simple purpose in an unexciting way. Sitemaps were an effective navigation tool in the pre-Google years to help users survey the site’s material at a glance and quickly access their desired information. Today sitemaps are also used by search engine optimization experts, who use a sitemap to enable an automated search engine spider to properly index all of a site’s pages. These days you can create an XML-format sitemap that is available only to search engines. It’s tempting for some site owners, confident that site visitors will find their way through navigational menus and search engines, to tuck the traditional, skeleton-like html sitemap into the closet.

Not so for Helen Whelan, President of Success Television and owner of www.successtelevision.com. “With a deep, content-rich site, the sitemap is a wonderful means of helping users find the article or videos that are most relevant to them,” she says. “We regularly track our sitemap metrics to see who’s coming there, where from, and where they visit next so we can improve upon our content offerings.”

Helen uses Google Analytics, a web statistics package, to monitor the ins and outs of her sitemap. She particularly likes the site overlay feature that graphically shows her which links visitors are clicking on within the sitemap. Her esteem for sitemap activity is not uncommon. The sitemap remains a popular navigation tool for surfers.

A sizable contingent of web surfers follow the navigation menu, search engine, sitemap pattern. This means they’ll look to the nav menu options first. If they can’t find what they’re looking for they’ll search and if the results disappoint them, they’ll try the sitemap. As such, the sitemap is their last hope before moving on to the next site.

There are pros and cons to each form of sitemap mentioned so far:

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