Site Navigation for SEM

Creating a Sitemap

While a good menu structure is important to aiding the crawling activity of search robots, for most medium-to-large sites, menus alone are often not sufficient to house links to all content contained in a site.  This is particularly the case where a site has a large number of areas that are not easily pointed to from a main menu.  Additionally, as we noted, menus delivered dynamically or as an image may not be easily understood by search engines.

For these situations it may be helpful to include a sitemap.  A sitemap offers a single page guide to site content and is presented in the form of text links.  A sitemap can help search engines locate hard to find pages.  In fact, many search engines now strongly encourage sitemaps as a way to speed up the process of locating site content.