HTML Sitemaps Guide

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).