HTML Sitemaps Guide

While a HTML sitemap primarily should focus on helping human visitors navigate your website, there are some things you can do to optimize it for search engines as well.

Website structure
Make sure you use meaningful keywords in your directory and file names throughout your website, e.g.
http://www.example.com/keywords-in-dir/keywords-in-page.html. If you are using a blog or content management system that makes this difficult, look into if you can find a plugin or mod_rewrite which solves the problem.

Page titles
This is tip 101 for all webmasters. Make sure all page titles in your website are unique and contain relevant keywords. Like having keywords in URLs, it really helps sitemap generator programs such as this in creating HTML sitemaps with relevant anchor text in links.

Linking your website sitemap
If you have all pages in your website link to your website sitemap, you ensure search engines such as Google and Yahooo will index and follow links in your sitemap. This can help you get new pages faster and higher ranked into search engine result pages.

In this tutorial we will use A1 Sitemap Generator to create our HTML sitemaps. The program has many options and can handle large websites. We will keep to default options, and only briefly discuss some of the advanced sitemapper settings.

Scan your website for pages
Before you can create a HTML sitemap, you will need to scan your website through for pages. A1 Sitemap Generator offers lots of options for crawler and output filters, robots.txt, no-follow and no-index, login authentication etc. However, you can ignore all those settings for most websites! You only need to fill in the path to your website and press start scan, that’s it!

Link check your entire website
When the scan has finished, you get an outline of your website with details for all pages. The website validation and link checker tools can help you solve various problems. When you are done, click the Create sitemap tab.

Ready to create the HTML sitemap
Select template sitemap and press the build sitemap button. Default template settings generates a valid HTML sitemap. However, you can create your own XHTML or HTML template if you wish. You can also adjust how the HTML sitemap generator builds the HTML sitemap, e.g. control max number of links per sitemap page, columns layout to use, anchor text generation etc.

View your HTML sitemap
After you have created your HTML site map, you can view the source code generated. There are also various shortcuts so you can view the generated site map files in different browsers.

Are you unsure what a HTML sitemap is and why you need it for your website?

Website sitemaps help people navigate
If people can not find what they are looking for, many will try search for a sitemap that can guide them to the correct page in your website.

Help search engine index and rank your pages
HTML sitemaps help search engines find and index all pages in your website. When creating a HTML sitemap you can push important or new pages. If you make sure all links in your HTML sitemap use keyword rich anchor text, you also improve chances for having your pages ranked high in search engine result pages for relevant search terms.

Technical information
You can also create sitemaps with XHTML. XHTML is similar to HTML, only difference is it conforms to XML syntax.

If you are running a website driven by a server-side language, e.g. PHP or ASP, you can still create HTML sitemaps. The important thing is not the language used at server-side, but instead what gets outputted (which is HTML or XHTML).

When designing a HTML sitemap for your website, whether manually or using a HTML sitemap generator program, you have to make it easy to use.

Indention in HTML Sitemaps
It can be helpful to have links indented in a tree style way that match underlying website structure. Makes it easier to understand and navigate the website.

• Directory A
  • Page A
  • Page B
• Directory B
  • Page C
  • Page D

Columns in HTML sitemaps
If you want to take full advantage of page width to lessen scrolling, it can be useful to create sitemaps that use 2 or 3 column layouts.

Have sitemap span multiple pages with large websites
If your website is very large and you start to have above 100-200 links on a sitemap page, you should consider splitting your sitemap across multiple pages. Even if your users can navigate the HTML sitemap, search engines such as Google and Yahoo may start ignore links if you have thousands on a single page.

Page and section titles in website sitemaps
If possible, make sure each linked item in your HTML sitemaps have descriptive anchor text. This helps people and search engines to understand your website.

Create your website sitemap now
If you are looking for a program to do all of above, try this sitemap generator.