HTML Sitemap: Know its Benefits for SEO and Website Users

HTML Sitemap

TechsPlace | When your website is crawlable, it means that you have successfully executed your technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The key to this success is an HTML sitemap. This is because it is through your sitemap that they crawl your website. They do this by sending a bot to your webpage and read it.

After that, these search engines; such as Google, will determine what is on your page. This is how your page appears in search results – the first step. This article talks about what HTML is, how to create it, and its benefits. To learn more about this, keep reading.

What are HTML Sitemaps?

In general, the duty of an HTML sitemap is to assist search engines to categorize your site. Helping it to become very accessible to both humans and search engines. But what is an HTML sitemap?

HTML sitemaps are files that have a list of all the essential pages of your site that you desire from Google and other search engines like Bing to index. This indexing involves search engines gathering and storing your landing pages in their database. After that, the search engine makes reference to the database when responding to the search queries of users. Homepages that are not indexed cannot be found. This also means that they will not rank in the results of search engines.

Sitemaps do not only list these pages on your website. They also hold information about every page. The information includes when the website was created, its significance concerning the other website pages, and previously updated.

Benefits of HTML Sitemaps

Google factors in user experience during website ranking. You will succeed in showing that your website is user-friendly by displaying HTML to search engines. However, HTML has many other benefits aside from improving your website’s SEO ranking and making it more user-friendly. Some other benefits are as follows:

1. Allows you to add New Content to Powerful Sites Smoothly

An HTML sitemap is crucial for a website that changes often. During the addition of pages, mere looking at your sitemap give you a clue of where it fits logically.

2. Organize Big Websites

HTML sitemaps run as directories for all webpages, enabling users to easily find what they are searching for.

3. See Internal Linking Opportunities

HTML sitemaps allow site owners to identify internal links easily. And this factor is also very crucial for SEO improvement.

4. Enables Search Engines to Categorize your Content Easily

It helps search engines to know what your content is about. Because without this, they will be unable to rank your content.

5. Recognize Spots to Upgrade Navigation

A sitemap can help you see better ways to improve your website’s general navigation. This can come in very handy, especially if your site is older with plenty of archived content that lacks proper organization.

How to Make an HTML Sitemap

You do not need to be a software expert to be able to set up an HTML sitemap. Because of all of its benefits, you might have also written off the possibility of setting up an HTML website.

However, we are delighted to let you know that creating a sitemap is super easy. You don’t even need to be a whiz in coding. There are two different ways of making a sitemap: Manually or with the use of a CMS plug-in.

Regardless of the path, you choose to use, submit your sitemap for indexing to Google Search Console on completion of creation. After that, add your domain and verify, as instructed by Google.

After that, you can access a dashboard (search console). You will find a “Crawl” section on the left-hand side of the dashboard. Click “Sitemaps” and “Add/Test Sitemap.” this tool will flag all errors. This means that the route you decide to use to create your sitemap does not matter.

After all of these have been fixed, click on submit and leave the rest to Google. They will ensure that your website is indexed.

1. Manually Add a New Page

If you own a small website, say a hundred pages or less, you can manually create a sitemap. Create a list of all of the links on your site and then organize them concerning subpages and pages. You can also do this by using XML-Sitemaps.com.

2. With Your CMS, Use a Plug-in

You can create a sitemap using a plug-in for the content management system on your website. If you use WordPress, download the Sitemap plugin or Hierarchical HTML Sitemap plug-in.

After that, set up a new page for your site and label it “Sitemap.” After that, follow the plug-in instructions to include the shortcode of the HTML to the page. When you are done, Publish.

Conclusion

It doesn’t make much sense to own a website that is not crawlable and does not rank. Why leave your website to chance when you can quickly set up your sitemap? HTML sitemaps assist search engines in categorizing your website and becoming more accessible to both humans and search engines. Aside from this, it has other benefits that were highlighted above. We hope that our article has given you informative tips on how to improve your website.