Marketing Holistics

Site maps are used for more than planning and efficient repurposing/redesigning. I recently received my monthly newsletter from internet marketing guru, Bruce Clay. I already knew that when the Google bot first comes to your server, it eagerly searches for the site map and uses the file as a guide to spider all the pages in your site. Bruce uses Google’s site map as a good usability example. Google is perfection in my book. Bruce provides a link to Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Putting information architecture & usability issues aside for the moment, the site map serves as a list of everything the spider needs to digest and index. Appropriate naming conventions are critical for this reason. Then, if your page titles, meta keywords, headers, and content support and inform the page naming, you are on your way to achieving a page one organic position and this is crucial for the internet marketer.

Bruce’s article gets a bit tricky and granular at this point. He competently draws the distinction between site maps and xml sitemaps. Bruce explains that Sitemaps are lists of links in XML, files read by Spiders and traditional html Site Maps could easily be used by humans to navigate a site.

I have found that many people are a bit confused about the difference between site maps and xml sitemaps. Recently, an internet marketing sales manager asked me to discuss/present the differences to his team who probably thought that anyone who found all this interesting and exciting was a bit __________. (fill in the blank)

The really cool/interesting thing is that the site maps and sitemaps (below)  are literally opposite sides of the same valuable coin.

Bottom line: make life easy for the Google Bot and also make life easy for your web development team/