Is a sitemap essential for SEO? SEO brings traffic and your website earns revenue. Sitemaps are essential for the search engines to crawl and index the website such that the content is ranked in the search results. A sitemap leads your visitors to the place they wish to go. Apart from helping visitors in navigating the website, a sitemap is needed for various reasons. Thus, it is a must to understand the sitemaps types: XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps.
What Are XML Sitemaps?
These are the sitemaps helping search engines and thereby the spiders identify your website pages. The sitemaps give the URL of a website to the search engines and give a complete map of the pages on the site. Thus, the search engines crawl prioritizing the pages. An XML sitemap is of immense use for the large websites, else it may take a longer time for the spiders to crawl the site. Every site has a crawl budget allocated and no search engine can craw URLs each time. An XML sitemap helps to build its pages queue it wants to serve.
What Are HTML Sitemaps?
HTML sitemaps serve website visitors. They come as a clickable list or even if it in the raw form, it may be an unordered list of pages. However, creating order in HTML sitemaps is the best and worth the effort. HTML sitemaps are essential and here are a few reasons to keep or include an HTML sitemap.
1. Organizes Large Websites
Your website grows and adding an eCommerce store means you expand the product portfolio. The site grows with the addition of a new company or people. The HTML sitemap works like any shopping mall or department store map. The sitemap helps taking stock of every page and ensures it is the rightful home in the site.
2. Functions as an Architect & Project Manager
The HTML sitemap for your website is an architectural blueprint. The sitemap here is like a project management tool that oversees the connections and structure between subpages and pages. A good sitemap is similar to having a daily schedule well-organized.
3. Highlights the Purpose of the website
The HTML sitemap defines the specific value of a website. It can be used as SEO to enjoy the benefit and this can be done with relevant and unique keywords inclusion in the sitemap. Anchor text creates keyword relevancy without cross-links, while a sitemap reveals the anchor text power.
4. Increases the speed of the Search Engine Crawlers work
It helps the search engines to take control of the work. It means the assistance is in finding content and moving it to the crawl queue. While an XML sitemap is a list of links, the HTML links are the way for the search crawlers to discover the web. The HTML sitemap brings attention to the content by throwing the spotlight on the most important pages on your website. Submitting a text version to Google is possible on your sitemap.
5. Increase Visibility of the Search Engine
Google and some search engines may not be able to do the indexing of each webpage. For instance, having a link on your webpages means the search bots get the link. The bots verify the link is making sense. The HTML sitemap directs the bots to get your site the entire picture and considers all the pages. This facilitates the job of the bots and they stay longer to follow the navigation of the page laid out for them. The sitemap also helps the crawlers in understanding the taxonomy of the website.
6. Enables the Page Links Naturally
The HTML sitemap identifies the ideal connection and addresses visitors. The HTML sitemap reflects the journey of a visitor and guides them to purchase. The HTML sitemaps help in raising the organic search visibility of the linked pages.
7. Identifies Areas that Site Navigation can Improve
As the website grows and more pages develop, there may be duplicate data, and it causes problems. On mapping everything, you can use the sitemap to eliminate the duplication. On applying heat map tools or analytics, it will show the HTML sitemap is being used by more visitors, but you should reassess to know why the current navigation is not in use. Determine the site architecture changes so that it is easier to find as they need. The advantage is with the HTML sitemap when it is maintained. You get to save money and time. They guide your visitors in closing the sales or in getting what they need.
Getting Started
Are you using the WordPress platform and do not have an HTML sitemap? At least consider the plug-ins of the sitemap to automate the process of sitemap management and development. Developing the HTML sitemap is essential and also remember to add a link to the website so that it is found easily by the search engines. Place the link in a footer menu, at the top or as a sidebar so that visitors access page to page.