Now you’ve gone from having content, to having actual html files that can be integrated into your site. Most site owners don’t really know (or care) how this is done, as long as they see the new content on their site somewhere… so this step is usually left up to the judgment of a web designer. The problem is, many web designers are great at design, but don’t fully understand proper website architecture.

The Goal
The primary goal when it comes to integrating your new content pages is to make it as easy as possible for both people and search engine spiders to find them, navigate within them, and return easily to other areas of your site.

Here are 4 key steps to proper content page integration:

1. Build a directory page that lists all your titles, showing 20 to 50 titles per page. (Google recommends not having more than 100 links on a page.) Consider this an archive page where people can access all your articles or posts. The most common way to list them is to place your most recent articles at the top and push older ones down on the list.
   
   
2. Place a link on your homepage that leads directly to this new archive page. This link can be called “Articles”, or in the case of a blog, simply call it “Blog”. Some sites call it “Resources” or “Learn More”. By placing a link on your homepage directly to your archive page, your new content will be just one click away from your homepage, or in file structure terms, one level down from the “root domain”. This is important since Google sometimes will not crawl pages that are too “deep” within your site. How many pages Google will crawl on your site depends on the PageRank value of your site, as well as how often you update your site with new content.
   
   
3. Naming your html pages is another important, yet often overlooked detail. Search engines do look at the name of your page and give some weight to keywords within the page name. The simplest way to do this is to just use the title of each article as its page name, with each word in the title separate by either a dash - or an underscore _ . For example, if the title of your article or post is “Top 10 Tips for Buying a Used Car”, than the URL for this page would be http://www.yourdomain.com/top_10_tips_for_buying_a_used_car.html
   
   

Do I Need a Sitemap?
Unless you have a lot of dynamically generated pages on your site (pages that don’t have separate html files but are generated on the fly from a database), you probably don’t need to worry about a sitemap. Google and other search engines will have no problem finding the “Articles” link on your homepage, and will then find the Archive page you created. From there, the spider can index all your other articles.

However, Google does recommend using a sitemap just in case.

Google also teaches how to set up a Sitemap using XML to tell their spider even more information about your sites structure. This format allows you to tell Google things like how often you expect different pages to be updated with fresh content so that Google can estimate how often it should come back and re-spider your site.

Bottom Line
Don’t assume your web designer fully understands how to properly integrate your content onto your site. If you’re not sure, copy this list and give it to your web designer and confirm that he/she will implement these proper integration techniques.

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