The main objective of a sitemap is to help the website visitors get information which they haven’t been able to find from the dropdown menus. While your main focus needs to be to help your viewers get information easily, the sitemap can help your website in a number of other ways.
In this scenario it is worth mentioning that there are two types of sitemap, i.e. XML sitemap and HTML sitemap.
The main purpose of XML sitemaps is to help search engines and its spiders discover the webpages on your website. The XML sitemap contains information about page change frequency on one page as compared to other pages on the website. This sitemap is quite useful for the large websites through which the spider might take long time to crawl through.
HTML sitemap, on the other hand, is created mainly to entertain users. This sitemap includes every page in the website, from main pages to lower level pages. This file on the site mainly contains clickable links in the form of a list.
While your site may have an XML sitemap, you may think that an HTML sitemap is not necessary. But there are some solid reasons you need to have an HTML sitemap. Those reasons are worth mentioning here.
Organize large websites
You may have started with a small website, but it is going to grow with the passage of time. If it is an e-commerce website, there are going to be the addition of more pages which may include new departments and expansion of product portfolios.
Now, a grown website can be confusing for a lot of people, and rightly so. That’s because it might get difficult for many people to find the required source of information from an extended menu on the top of the website. An HTML sitemap can be a quick reference in this regard.
Project manager and architect
You can consider HTML sitemap as an architectural blueprint of your website. As a matter of fact, an HTML sitemap can act like a project management tool because it oversees the structure and connections between the pages and subpages.
Highlighting the website’s purpose
When it comes to defining the specific value of your website, HTML sitemap is a document which can be quite helpful in this regard. This is the very benefit which you can enhance with the help of effective SEO practices. You can also target specific keywords using this sitemap. And the biggest benefit of this approach is that you are not going to have to create any content for this purpose. You can simply use anchor text instead of naked URLs.
Easing the crawling work for search engine bots
To ensure that your website is indexed as soon as possible, you are going to have to make the crawling job easy for search engine crawlers. This is where an HTML sitemap can be quite helpful. If you look at the XML sitemap, you will find it more like a laundry list of links. On the other hand, search engine crawlers prefer going through the HTML links present in the HTML sitemap.
Increasing search engine visibility
Google and all other search engines might not index every page present in certain websites. The reason is that the bots want to make sure that the links they follow make sense. During this process, the bots may never return to certain pages.
With the help of an HTML sitemap, an entire picture of the website is shown to the Google. This way, the search bots may remain on your website, exploring the links.
Emmitt Mayers 