As previous SEO Manual entries have shown, sitemaps are a great way to get your website indexed; along with helping Google Bots and Humans to view all of the web pages available. This entry will go into detail of the benefits of having a HTML sitemap on a website.

Unnecessary Page Views

Firstly, when anybody visits a website they will more often than not land on the homepage; this is how websites are designed and how it should be. Yet, visitors land on the homepage more often than not already knowing what they are looking for. Homepages are a great way to give an introduction and overview to a website, but for someone who already knows what they looking for it’s just another web page that has to be viewed before finding what they are after.

Once a user has landed on the homepage and they need to find something specific they will usually look at the navigation menu first. This can also add another set of web pages for the user to look at before finding exactly what they want, this is where a HTML sitemap is key. If a HTML sitemap link is included at the bottom of every web page within a website, a visitors first button click can direct them to the sitemap where a list of every web page is. This enables the user to scan through the list of links and find exactly what they are looking for without the need to visit other web pages that may make the user undesirably click away to another website.

How Complicated?

As HTML sitemaps go, they are pretty basic. A web page with a list of links to each web page within a website. The benefits you gain are well worth the time it takes to make one. HTML sitemaps are often kept within the same colour scheme and style as the rest of the website.

An example of a HTML sitemap is: http://www.positiongoldltd.com/site-map/

Not only do HTML sitemaps provide humans the visual aid they may need to find information, but search engines give credit to websites which have internal linking. Providing a page with a list of links which all internally link may prompt the search engines to give you credit for it by adjusting your pagerank etc.

Summary

To summarise, the time taken to create a HTML sitemap is well worth it when placed against the amount of visitors can be kept and the additional credit the website may gain from search engines.

A HTML site map is a list of links to all the accessible pages within your site. In the past, before XML sitemaps, HTML site maps were used to provide a map of the pages contained within the site to the search engine. Today, most of the major search engines; MSN, Yahoo! and Google and their affiliates have all moved on to using other forms of site maps, such as XML, which are normally tailored specifically for that search engine. This being said, HTML site maps still have their place within todays market place, and still give you weight within the SERP’s pages. Their purpose is two fold; firstly some of the small search engines still use HTML site maps as part of their indexing process, although these search engines won’t bring you a large quantity of traffic, they will bring enough to justify the building of a HTML site map. The second reason for a site map is that it allows human visitors to easily navigate your site. This is a useability issue and allows advanced users use a site map to locate pages within a large site. Because of this, the major 3 search engines will give weight to your site in the SERP’s, because you are catering for your users and at the end of the day that is what the search engines really want to rank you on. A HTML sitemap link should be on everyone of your pages within the website, with a few exceptions. At a stretch you can also use your HTML instead of an XML site map for the big three search engines, although I recommend having both.

To summarise, HTML site maps still have a place within todays market and shouldn’t be overlooked by a developer or SEO, even if they take some time to create them. The benefits are there from both a usability and a ranking point of view.