Though I have been a member of SEOmoz for sometime now and am actually one of the first 5 PRO members on SEOmoz (under my top secret account), this is my first blog post. I was encouraged by Rebecca’s request for SEOmozzers to unite. In a recent post I discussed creating SEO friendly widgets, so today I will discuss how to create SEO friendly maps.

Maps are important segments of many sites, especially news, real estate, classifieds, gas prices, traffic, jobs and local sites. But unfortunately, most of these sites have unfriendly maps or map pages.

Michael Young provides a very good Google Maps/ AP News mashup, but none of content is included in the source code and the side links don’t link to individual pages (they just highlight stories within the map).

Here are the best practices for creating SEO Friendly Maps:

Provide separate “list view” and “map view” pages: I recommend having the “list view” and the “map view” as 2 separate pages and not using CSS to toggle between the Map and the List on the same page. The main reason is maps require many lines of code and JavaScript functions that will dilute your content. 

Example: trulia.com/CA/San_Francisco/ - The page has “expand map functionality” that expands the map view on the same page. As expected, the code-to-text ratio is very low (less than 8%) due to extensive code 

On the other hand, zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Montclair-NJ/ have separate map pages that are excluded in robots.txt or map pages that have # in URL (zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Montclair-NJ/#/homes/for_sale/map/) that get ignored by search engines as well

Provide Alternative Links: If you can’t create a separate page for hard coded links to the embedded content “list view,” provide an RSS feed for the links included in the map or provide a side rail navigation. Side navigation links should serve 2 purposes

• When moused-over: highlight listings on the map
• When clicked-on: go to listings detail page

Social Maps: Provide linking and sharing tools in your maps. Google Maps recognizes the importance of the social aspects of maps, which is why all their maps have sharing and linking tools.

SEO 101: Surround your maps with keyword rich copy, optimize your page titles, meta data, on-page elements, etc … the whole SEO 101 page optimization.

1. Keyword-rich surrounding text
2. RSS feed provides links to embedded data
3. Sharing & linking tools 

Maps should not be the primary or the only way you deliver content on your site. While you may become a very popular site, you limit your traffic to 1 page. For example, marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm. Creating additional news maps pages for France, USA, Canada, India, etc. will multiply the traffic coming to the site. Creating “List View” pages for each of these categories will maximize the traffic even further (a better example is buzztracker.org/).

Maps Index Page: If your site contains different content maps, create an index/section page to list all maps on your site.

Link Bait: like any other creative widget, maps can generate a ton of links to your site. If you are syndicating your maps data or just creating map widgets, place all data in AJAX with hard coded links back to your site, and don’t spam “you know the trick.” 

So the next time you embed a map on your site, embed an SEO-friendly map.

John Shehata is a senior SEO Manager for Advance Internet (CondéNet Sister Company), managing SEO for 12 local news sites and over 35 daily newspapers.