A Search Engine Secret

Anyway, some search engines will only crawl to two or three levels deep on your site. By creating a site map which lists every page of your site that you want indexed, and by linking to the site map from your index page, you ensure that even the search engines that limit the depth their spiders crawl will still find all your pages.

Here's how those search engine will see your site if you have a site map in your the directory:

• Top Level: All pages in the root directory, including the site map.
• Level Two: All your pages, if you have a site map on level one.
• Level Three: Who cares—you've already won!

Think carefully about which pages you include in your site map. Pages that won't help your search engine positioning—read that to mean off-topic pages—are usually best left off. The more pages you have that depart from the theme and purpose of your site, the more fractured it becomes and the less important the search engine will deem your site. In this search engine era, having a strong theme is critical to having your site considered as an authority site. Authority sites rank higher.

Hey, I've got another secret for you. Search engines like XML site maps even better than HTML site maps. In my SEOS Lite and SEOS Pro I include where to find the software for generating HTML and XML site maps. Doing it by hand is very tedious, and the larger your site the worse the task is. These automated tools can generate a site map for a site with hundreds of pages in just a minute or two.

Ideally, you've created your web site on your own computer as it is on the Internet, and used the meta description tag for each page. If so, some of the site map generatiing software will create the site map without going online, just point the software to your web site folder and it will make a site map of your pages using the meta description as the link description. If you didn't use the meta description tags on your pages the site map just won't have descriptions for your links.

There you have the lowdown on site maps . . . but there's so much more that goes into search engine optimization. Even if you do everything right, there's no guarantee your site will rank well, but two things are certain:

1. If you don't do as much as you can to optimize your web site the odds of achieving a good ranking are greatly stacked against you.
2. If you do things wrong, the search engines will know about it and your site ranking will suffer for it.