A sitemap is a map of website pages that helps visitors and search engines navigate your website.
There are two types of sitemaps HTML and XML sitemaps.
HTML sitemaps are primarily for website visitors. While XML sitemaps primarily guide search engines to discover and crawl your web pages.
Most websites simply use XML sitemaps for search ranking, but HTML sitemaps are also important. Here’s why.
1: Helps in Organizing Large Websites
Your website typically runs into hundreds of web pages, including product or service pages. The quickest shortcut to reach a destination page is the HTML sitemap.
2: Projects the Purpose of Your Website
An HTML sitemap is essentially a content map that can enhance your website’s value to your target audience. The keywords included in the sitemap can improve your website’s search engine optimization techniques, thereby resulting in better website ranking.
Using anchor texts in the sitemap can also contribute to an improvement in website SEO via inter-links.
3: Guide Search Engine Spiders to Navigate Your Website
Every website needs to be crawled by search engines, in order to get indexed on the search engine for online visibility.
An HTML sitemap can also help this process.
4: Reveals Web Architecture
HTML sitemaps are similar to the blueprint of your architectural project. It revels the structure and the underlying linkages of your website.
5: Improve Search Engine Visibility
Often, search engine spiders will not crawl all the pages on your website.
If your website has a well-planned sitemap, then the likelihood of all the pages being crawled increases, resulting in improved search indexation, and visibility.
6: Help in Inter-linking
Using an HTML sitemap, you can optimize your website to highlight preferred pages as authoritative pages. Interlinking other pages to these pages becomes easier.