HTML Sitemaps Explained

7 January, 2008 (06:48) | Create Sitemaps

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).

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