When thinking about your sitemap, there are two things you need to bear in mind. What do your customers need? and then what do search engines need? Answer both questions with your sitemap and you’ve made a good start on a great site.
The structure
At a structural level, the first thing to remember is that the site shouldn’t be too deep. No more than three levels is ideal. So, this would be good:
- Home
- About Us
- Our Team
- Our History
- Vacancies
- Press Releases
- About Us
And this would be not so good:
- Home
- About Us
- About Our Company
- Our History
- Press Releases
- About Our Staff
- Our Team
- Vacancies
- About Our Company
- About Us
Why? Because people lose interest (and get lost) the deeper into a site they go. And search engines feel the same way.
Simple steps to create a sitemap
To get started, brainstorm every area of your business a visitor might want to know about. Now organise that information into groups based on types of information those visitors might need to know. That means information on your company in one area; information on your products in another and so on.
The next step is to look at each group of information and ask:
- which of these pieces of information are essential to help most customers make the decision to choose my business over someone else’s?
and
- which pieces of information might some customers need to help them make that decision?
Let’s take an example – the About Us section of your site. Most customers will be looking for something like photos of your team or a summary of how your process works. That’s the information you put on the main About Us page. Some customers will also want the reassurance of knowing a bit about how the company started and how it got to where it is today. So that’s information you could summarise at the bottom (or side) of the About Us page with a link to a page that gives full details.
Do this for every section of your site and you’re off to a good start. The next step is to look at the information that’s on each page and make sure it answers all the questions your visitors might be asking. That’s the subject of the next post.
Catherine Every at EveryWord
Visit her website or follow her on Twitter
