A sitemap is often considered by some web designers as redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the case if you make a sitemap simply for the sake of having one on your site.

By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally represents a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets confused by the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see wherever they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Communicating your site’s theme

When your visitors load your sitemap, they’ll get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to acquire the “big picture” of your site by browsing through every page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are in reality producing a single page which contains links to every individual page on your site. Imagine what happens when a search engine robot hits this page — they will follow every link on your sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by the search engine! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed conspicuously on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you want to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you’ll have a perfectly organized site with everything grouped according to their relevance.

As can be seen from the above points, it is most important to implement a sitemap for all website projects with a considerable size. By using a sitemap and the above points when designing your sitemap, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone. Thus hopefully ensuring that your visitors will return to your site frequently.

It is recommended that you use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is unlike a Meta tag, but it’s worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the <title> and </title> portions, in html terms, on a page) will appear in the title bar of a browser when visitors view your web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, for instance Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you’ve designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words, phrases and content will draw visitors and therefore potential customers to your site by using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not need to know the name of your business until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating the first three positions for keywords in a title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is all important in search engine optimization.

Whenever a person visits your site and leaves, chances are that he or she won’t return, particularly if there are no compelling reasons to do so. After all, we all behave rather impulsively on the Internet, so much so that we can easily forget where we were ten web pages ago.

But the bottom line is that your visitor may not come back to your website again. If 1,000 visitors visit your website, leave and never come back again, you can imagine the amount of potential income lost, merely because they do not return. You could have converted a fraction of the visitors into your customers.

Some Internet Marketing gurus may say that creating unique content will keep some of the visitors coming back, but very often, unique content is not the only answer. The real, long-term solution lies in converting your visitors into subscribers of your mailing list.

Before your visitor leaves your website, you want to convert him or her into your subscriber via a simple opt-in to your mailing list. You do this by asking for your visitor’s name and email address through your opt-in form. In order to achieve this it is often customary to offer some form of incentive in order to obtain their details, this can either be a free report, ebook or piece of software.

And if your visitor signs up to be on your mailing list, you can still follow up with them via email. You can get your subscriber to consider your offer, or endorse another offer to him or her.

All in all, you want to convert as many visitors, if not all, into subscribers as possible and obtain the potential revenue you rightfully deserve – the easy and wise way.