I was shopping with my mother in a large store that she hadn’t been to before.  She felt uncomfortable in the unfamiliar surroundings. She wanted to buy some bread and we were in the clothes section. Until you become more familiar with a large store layout you can sometimes feel a little lost. It's good for customers to be relaxed when shopping as they will enjoy the experience more and perhaps buy more or feel persuaded to return. Happy shoppers are more likely to buy more. Not being familiar with the layout and feeling lost my mother stopped and interrupted a manager and a member of staff. The manager immediately finished his conversation, looked briefly around and walked us to the main aisle. Here he continued to give us instructions of where we needed to go. He had positioned this conversation in front of a store map. There were certain advantages to this technique. We now knew there were maps in the store should we get lost. Having seen the store layout we were more able to negotiate the store without interrupting staff. He didn't need to walk us the whole length of the store. We had seen a visual diagram of the store layout and understood that if we got lost again we could return to an aisle to find a map. He didn't tell us the latter. He showed us via his actions.

We are taught at school that when researching books for information we can look at the table of contents at the front of the book for an overview of the books contents, or use the index at the rear of the book to search for more specific items. These pages allow us to navigate the book easily.

Our website menus act as an indicator of content. When included within the menu of a site, the site maps allow our users to quickly search and identify the content of our site to find what hey are looking for. The site map provides us with the fastest route to the desired information or product when we are searching for specifics rather than browsing. When we recognise there is a map available we are likely to use is to get us directly to our desired location quickly and efficiently. The site map often represents the hierarchical structure of a website. In some cases, especially larger sites, the use of a site map can make the site more useable and improve the visitor experience.

Web masters use a file called a sitemap to inform the search engines of the pages (URL's) included within a web page that they would like to have indexed by the search engine. There is a protocol for the structure of this file that can be found at sitemaps.org. A sitemap is usually in xml format, but can be a text file or syndication feed. Against each URL (page) included in the file, you can include the following optional information; last modification date, change frequency and priority. Each sitemap file must have no more than 50,000 URL's. Where required, a sitemap index file can be used to group sitemaps. It is recommended that you have a sitemap within the root directory of your site. A sitemap can only include URL’s that can be derived from themselves, or paths immediately following the URL location. After creating a sitemap, you register it by submitting it to the search engines of your choice. The search engine providers will then in some cases provide you with details of search information and processing errors that occur whilst they visit your site based on the contents within your sitemap. For instance, when you register your sitemap at Google, you are provided with some web site tools that enable you to see when Google last scanned and indexed the pages of your site, what key words it feels are prominent within your site, the top search queries featuring your site, and the top queries relating to your site that resulted in the action of a click. Google also provides you with details on the link structure of your site: how sites link to you; how you link internal site pages; and the pages Google links to via its search engine. It may improve the optimisation of the page if Google accepts your web site and sitemap, i.e. the page will have a higher ranking among the results displayed when it is found after a search within Google. Frequently asked questions (FAQ) on sitemaps have been answered at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Give others a map it helps them find your products and or services!

Web Page Last updated: Feb 2008