Effective Sitemap Guidelines
One of the most important items on a website is the sitemap. There are some effective sitemap guidelines to follow when creating and linking the map to your site. These include where to link and place the sitemap, how it should be formatted, and why to have one in the first place.
Effective sitemap guidelines state that a sitemap should exist for every site and should be placed in the root directory of your website. This is for two reasons, the map should be located close to the main site pages as search engines place more importance on pages close to the root, and the sitemap is one of the most important pages for search engines to find so that they may fully index your site.
Based on effective sitemap guidelines no more than 30 links should be on each page. Some schools of thought allow for up to 100 links but this pushes the boundaries of a link farm. So keep mapping concise and if necessary use multiple pages. Also, use a title and description for each page and create the map in outline format so if 3 pages pertain to one page then indent their entries under the top level page.
The reason for following effective sitemap guidelines is that search engines will be able to spider pages more easily and it will help to distribute page rank. In addition, your users may find that a map is easier to navigate than your site.
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