Hacked UR Site — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:51:51 GMT

Yes and No. Sitemaps are very good for SEO, but not for “keyword density”, but for better indexing. This page helps search engine crawlers to find all the pages on the site and index them. Keyword density has no value in todays SEO, moreover the efforts for increasing keyword density could be considered as spamming to trick the spiders, so better be careful.

On the other side, when we talk about users, it will be incorrect to consider site map as starting point on the website.

Site Map should serve as Starting point for Search engines but not for the user.

Site map is good for assistance but if more and more users have to navigate to site map to find pages of interest then there is something wrong with your website navigation. Also for a website with more than 1000+ pages, do you think a user will care to visit it, dig all links to find a specific page? No, he/she won’t unless there is no other option and the user knows the specific information resides only on that perticular website and nowhere else.

As I said about other options, the best way for a user to reach to desired page would be the user-friendly navigation and having a Site Search. As a user I will first try to reach to page that holds interesting stuff with the Navigation available, if I couldn’t then I will use the Site Search and if all these fails then only I will go to Site Map and I think this is true for any other user.

Conclusion: Give importance to site maps from SEO perspective, and try to enhance other sections of website to reduce user visits to this page.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Hacked UR Site

Site Map should serve as Starting point for Search engines but not for the user.