While it may not be the slickest page on your ecommerce website, it surely is effective and more importantly essential. A Sitemap is a “directory” of your complete website that provides text-based information and directions to users and search engine bots. A well written Sitemap is a structural representation of all the webpages along with directive links that branch out from the root of your domain. A Sitemap, when implemented correctly, can provide a platform to improve revenues and productivity by:
- Increasing the visibility of all pages of your website (for users and search engines alike)
- Providing a straightforward navigation structure that helps customers find the product, service, or information they are looking for on demand
- Allowing a webmaster to strategically use target keywords to improve your site’s organic search rankings
- Directing the search engine spiders to all the webpages on the website, ensuring page indexing of each webpage
- Helping in the monitoring and correcting of broken links
Getting a Sitemap ready should ideally go with your ecommerce development. If the case may not match, i.e. you have a ready website and then you realize that there is a sudden need of a Sitemap, you need not worry as there are tools that dynamically generate an HTML Sitemap for your website. A point to be noted here is to stay consistent while designing a Sitemap.
Clearly we are creating a link mine for the search engines in a Sitemap. So we need to take care in putting up what the search engines like most – text, text, and more text. Hence a text-based Sitemap is the best solution for your ecommerce website. Moreover you have that pleasure to put in a truck load of keywords with links and make it look like it isn’t stuffed at the same time! The design should be such that it gives the user an idea if the link is a sub-page of other webpage. Most importantly, give a link to the Sitemap from each page of your website. Lastly, since you have an ecommerce website make sure you keep updating the Sitemap as and when you add and/or remove products and pages from the website, lest occurrence of broken links and missing webpages.