Making full use of a site map and site search form

Web users like to find what they are looking for fast. This is a rule that applies to every web page. Many users will simply leave your web site if they can’t find what they are looking for quickly. So to help them out consider having a search form and a site map on your website.

When I visit a webpage and I can’t find the specific page I am looking for, the first thing I do is look for a search form, to take away the pain of sifting through many web sites’ difficult navigation. In my experiences most websites do not have a search form. In the minority of cases where the pages do have them, at least half either don’t work properly or don't work at all.

Without a search form, you don’t know what exactly your visitors are looking for and if you don’t know what they are looking for, how can you give it to them? Some might say that you can check your search engine referral reports, but they tell only half of the story.

When you search for juicy oranges are you looking to buy juicy oranges or to sell juicy oranges? Perhaps you’d like a recipe for juicy oranges or a place to pick juicy oranges? How can you tell?

The search form on your website can help you discover exactly what your visitors want and then expand what you have to both increase the percentage conversion of your visitors into customers and attract more visitors.

If your visitors experience difficulty finding what they were looking for after landing at your webpage experienced web users can simply ask Google to find what they are looking for (with the command site:www.yoursite.com ‘keywords’) but most visitors will simply leave your website and move on to one of your competitors.

Failing this, the next port of call is your site map.

The site map on many websites is likened to the appendix of the human body, we know of it, but seldom make use of it or even understand how it works. If used properly it can enhance the visitors experience and increase sales.

If organised logically and concisely, web users will be able to track down the information or item they came looking for when they landed at your web site

The site map is also a guaranteed way of letting search engine spiders find web pages that would otherwise be 'orphaned' on your web site. By having your site map link to all pages and having the site map linked to from your index page allows your pages to be picked up quicker by the search engines and hence rank faster resulting in more traffic and more sales.

Many webmasters forget about this as they plow through their nice site design.

It should be noted that search engine spiders index sequentially. Initially they will come to your index page (or an internal page that has an external link pointing at it) and visit each page that is linked to from the landing page, these pages are then cached and set as a new start point from where the spiders will scan your site. This means that any page that is linked to greater than three hops away from your index page is going to take long time for the search engine spiders to find.

This is exceptionally important for large sites where it is difficult to have thousands of links situated on the index page. In this case I find that it is always better to set a maximum number of links per page to between 25 to 50. Why 25 to 50? Any more than this and your pages can become a little overwhelming and also have the importance of your page whittled down in the eyes of the search engines.

If you cater for this, your site will be indexed faster, allow your customers to find what they are looking for faster and be able to give them what they are looking for. Make use of the site map and search form, help your visitors and watch the sales increase.

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