The Forex Market

what is html sitemap html

XML sitemaps help search engine crawlers discover pages on your website.

These sitemaps give search engines website URLs and offer a complete map of all pages on a site. The information in the sitemap indicates how often the content of a URL changes relative to others on the site, but this is unlikely to have any effect on rankings.

An XML sitemap is very useful for large websites that would otherwise take a long time to be crawled by a crawler.

creating an HTML sitemap

Each site has a specific crawl budget allocated to it, so no search engine will crawl every URL the first time it encounters it. This is a good way for a search engine to build its queue of pages it wants to serve.

HTML sitemaps are for website visitors. These sitemaps also include every page of the website – from the main pages to the lower level pages, in a more readable and pleasant format than a simple XML list.

In its rawest form, it's an unordered list of all the pages on a site: of course, don't do that.

It's a great opportunity to bring order to the chaos, and it's worth making an effort, because the benefits are numerous both on the point of SEO and on the gain in User Experience.

Benefits of HTML Sitemap for User Experience

Besides making your site more user-friendly, an HTML sitemap has other benefits

Benefits of HTML Sitemap for User Experience

• Organize large sites

A site map is the digital equivalent of a map of a large shopping mall. It's a great way for the person running it to take stock of each page and make sure it belongs somewhere on the site.

It's also the page for users who can't find what they're looking for on the site and often their last resort to get there.

• Identify key pages to improve navigation

Not all pages are obviously available through a link in the header or footer. However, perhaps some deserve it… If this is the case, the sitemap will help you identify them.

In fact, using a “heat map” placed on your HTML sitemap, you can identify a visitor's journey from search to purchase. By doing so, you can identify important pages and increase the visibility of these pages, for example by adding them to your header menu.

The benefits of the HTML Sitemap for your SEO

Not only does taxonomy and link prioritization help users find their way around, but they are also very important for search bots. The sitemap can help them understand the taxonomy of the site by directing these crawlers to get a full picture of your site and consider all the pages.

Indeed, it can facilitate the work of crawler robots, and they can therefore stay longer to navigate the pages in the way offered to them.

Facilitate content categorization by search engines

To rank your content well, search engines need to know what it is about.

• You need to help these search engines any way you can and take control when you can. This help includes making it easier to find your content and getting it up in the crawler queue.
• While an XML sitemap is just a list of links, HTML links are actually how crawlers prefer to discover the web. This helps draw attention to particular content, emphasizing the most important pages on your site.

Find internal linking opportunities

Think of the HTML sitemap as an architectural blueprint for your website. It's the perfect way to ensure you have a consistent hierarchy and effective taxonomy across the entire site.

The sitemap would almost become a project management tool in itself: it oversees the structure and connections between pages and sub-pages.

For example, your HTML sitemap giving you an “at-a-glance” view of your entire site can help you quickly identify opportunities to add internal links , which are key to improving your SEO. .

This is a great way to ensure that no page on a site is orphaned.