Optimize HTML Sitemaps for Search Engines
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.
