Website Architecture Planning | Create Sitemaps

Some webmasters have raised questions over the effectiveness of HTML sitemaps. Many people put more emphasis on XML Sitemaps and in the process they forget about the HTML sitemaps which are also effective for navigation and search engines’ crawling. These sitemaps serve a dual purpose as they are meant both for the visitors as well as the search engine robots. Just like XML sitemaps there are many sitemap generators that can be used to create HTML sitemaps. Whenever a new website goes live, one has to submit their websites to the Search engines so that they know about the online presence of the website. In return, the search engines deploy their robots or crawlers on your website which help in the indexing process. These bots crawl through link by link and report it back to the search engine.

Getting ‘organic’ traffic to your website is a very challenging task; which is good and bad at the same time. It is good because it ensures that only the best websites feature on the top of SERPs, ensuring web surfers get access to quality and fresh information. On the other hand, website owners don’t like it because they have to compete with close to a billion other sites with their eyes focused on the medal; high rankings in the search engines. Competition is actually good, because it gives everyone a chance to outsmart the other, including websites. You can really make large strides by simply using a website mapping tool to create sitemaps.

Sitemaps play two main roles; improve user experience and ensures that your content is indexed by the search engines. This means that both web visitors and search engine spiders can find your site’s content, which is very important for search engines optimization. Having the links to all pages in a site in just a single page also ensures that you keep your site organized and also serve your visitors to the best of your website's ability. To realize this, you have to ensure that you create a sitemap that meets all the requirements.

Imagine taking a vacation to a foreign city without a map. In as much as you may be able to find yourself around using road signs and asking around, you will get lost so many times that you might even decide abort the trip or choose a different destination. This is the dilemma most web surfers experience whenever they land on information-rich websites. The same is experienced by the search engines because it becomes difficult to search and crawl all the pages as expected. If your content is not crawled, then it automatically means that millions of users using your target keywords on search engines for information will not be able to find you. You need a map that you can easily create with the help of a sitemap creator.

There are basically two main types of sitemaps; the HTML sitemap that is primarily built for human site visitors and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) sitemaps designed for the search engines. The HTML sitemaps are basically lists of links to all the pages in a website, just like a book’s table of content. In most cases, this kind of sitemap lists pages hierarchically based on the categories and their location on the site. You can use a website mapping tool to create sitemaps of this kind so that your visitors can quickly find the information on your website and search engines bots can thoroughly crawl the content.