Importance of HTML Sitemap

Sitemap and your Website

If you visit any website, you will find a fine print usually at the bottom which says “sitemap”. This link takes you to a page where the website’s organizational structure (page wise listing) will be there. One can call it as hierarchical listing of a website structure.

A sitemap has got important presence and role in overall website structure.

• It gives an easy navigation option to the website visitors. A visitor can jump to various sections of the website looking at the sitemap without getting lost in the website. Navigational menus can be confusing, so sitemap is used to aid visitor navigation.

• It organizes various sections, themes of a website in proper way. Thus a visitor can get a feel of the website and also a broad structure of the website. Thus, it helps in giving visitor an idea about the website theme and scope.

• Now, sitemap also plays an important role with respect to SEO. Implementation wise, a sitemap is a single page, which has links to all the pages of the website. When a search engine crawler comes to a sitemap, it gets all the links of the pages of a website. Thus, a sitemap helps search engine crawlers in crawling all the links and indexing all the pages of a website.

The key aspect is to create a sitemap and place it strategically on the home page so that when search engine crawler comes to the home page, it gets the link to the sitemap and it can crawl all the links specified in the HTML sitemap. Creating sitemap is bit tedious job but the benefit it provides far exceeds the efforts spent in creating it.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp