The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

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.

HTML is a markup language used to create web pages. HTML sitemaps are links to various pages of a website. Doing this is especially necessary for site visitors because they are not only able to find applicable information as per their needs, but also saves them time. Search engine bots can also use the links to trace content, some that might otherwise remain hidden during normal crawling of the website. It is now imperative that all webmasters clearly understand how to create a sitemap for their site because that simple act has lots of benefits in the long run.

There are three main varieties of ways to create sitemaps. The choice will depend on a number of factors, ranging from the nature of your website, content quantity, intended outcome, among others. Note that you can easily create sitemap using a sitemap generator.

• Indexed Sitemap: This is a directory or an alphabetical listing of your site’s pages.
• Complete Categorical Sitemap: This is the most popular comprehensive sitemap with classified links into categories. It is much easier to search for information and you can easily move between categories.
• Restricted Categorical: Here, all links in a specific category are displayed at a go. However, all links of a website are not shown as is the case with categorical sitemap and therefore limits the lists links in some categories which simplifies viewing and doesn’t strain the eyes.

With the dynamic nature of the web, having a sitemap for your website is a necessity that can only be ignored by people courting their own peril. However, some webmasters get lost whenever they decide to create sitemap for their sites and realize there are two types; HTML and XML sitemaps. Well, though the roles of both sitemaps are closely related, their targets differ; while HTML sitemaps target users, XML sitemaps on the other hand are meant for the search engines.

The number of websites in the world has surpassed 1 billion. This translates to 1 website for every seven people. This has resulted in competition for rankings in SERPs because every website owner wants to be found. Your site’s visibility first depends on the content, which then has to be crawled. This is a bit tricky if you have so many pages full of information, which makes it difficult for Googlebot spider to detect what should be indexed on your site. It is for this reason that Google sitemaps were introduced, which are basically text files with lists of web addresses of all the pages contained on your website.