Hi, I've noticed that my sitemap html page gets about 15 UV per day, what would be a useful method to bring these visitors into one of my landing pages? I was thinking either strengthen the landing pages with some off site optimization, or to try to get a conversion on the sitemap page. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who has to deal with this issue so I would love to get some feedback on it.
You may recheck your internal linking structure. Also, checkout the keywords that brings traffic to sitemap page and work on that.
Krates: I dont see how that helps my problem but thanks for the heads up. alemcherry: recheck my internet linking structure to see if what is wrong with it?
If it's that important to you just add the HTML sitemap to your robots.txt and add the nofollow attribute to all your internal links point to it. You should be using the standard XML sitemap.
dont agree with the bolded bit. your HTML sitemap is an opportunity to feed PR to each page listed on the sitemap, through potentially the most targeted anchor text the pages may ever get, ie. same as their page titles, if you nofollow the links to the sitemap, it can't do this. generally the sitemap will only rank if you have keywords in your pagetitles. if so swap them for a straight "sitemap" and that should be the end of it.
A couple of reasons a sitemap.html can rank well are: • In a typical internal linking structure, every other page in your website has a link to the sitemap.html — just as they probably do to the index.html page. So that's basically a "tie" score between the home page and the sitemap page on the internal linking issue. • Sitemap.html pages are very keyword-rich. Especially in a smaller website, which might have every other page linked to from the sitemap with well-chosen anchor text, the sitemap may have keywords on it that are not mentioned on the home page. That could give the sitemap an edge over the home page for those particular keywords.
I wouldn't do that if I were you. Search engines are just as capable of using a sitemap.html (or .php or .asp or .aspx) file as they are an XML file. Furthermore, the sitemap is a literal GODSEND for those who use it to navigate through a Web site. Believe it or not, not everyone uses the menu or even the search form when finding content and navigating their way through a Web page. For these people, a site map page is essential. If instead you want to prevent the page from being indexed while still following the links on that page, use the META tag. That way the search engnes can still find the page and follow the links on it, but won't be able to index it.
That is true, the sitemap is an excellent way for a user to navigate your website. I think you might of mis-understood my main reason for suggesting that. My main "theory" on the subject is do you really need don't your HTML sitemap indexed in search engines when your using an XML sitemap; I believe the XML sitemap should be enough. I actually block a lot of pages on my websites from search engines.. contact-us, privacy policy, copyright notice, etc, this is just something I practice and in no way claim it's a viable technique, I've just never had a negative impact from doing it. If fact when I had owner of nowthatshumor.com thats how I propelled it to #2 for the term "Funny Pictures", which now appears due to lack of maintaince of the new owner lost it's position. Think he would be offended him I offered him my monthly seo services?
Geez, had to have sold that at the end of 2007, I think early December. I just recieved an offer for the site I couldn't refuse at that time, especially since the site was taking up a large portion of my time that could of been sent productively on other prokects. I would agree, XML sitemaps are nessessary after a site has enough backlinks and is well index. But, this is just one of those things that I do for the sake of argument, also Ask.com seems to never index web pages I don't put in my XML sitemap (is this just me?). So, as long as there is no negative effect I always keep an updated XML sitemap for my web sites. It only takes 10 minutes or less to create it. I also always suggest this since I always practice the use of the auto-discovery sitemap directive for robots.txt files; which as example Ask.com only uses beyond pinging to locate your site map. http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22
And who cares about a search engine that is rebranding itself as a service for married women looking for information these days?
Hey, we all know women (especially married ones) spend the most money on useless items! I'm just one of those people who don't gear my site towards a specific search engine, as you practice yourself I'm sure. I aim for the four major search engines; Google, Yahoo!, Live Search & Ask.com to try and cover the entire market. I'm actually considering to see how hard it would be to rank in the larger Chinese search engine that is beating Google in search percent for their region.