What is An XML Sitemap? An HTML Sitemap?
• Understanding The Difference Between an XML and an HTML Sitemap •
• And … What Pupose Do They Serve? •
I’ve previously posted about how my friend’s mini-site was holding a top-ten Google ranking within 24-hrs after I submitted an XML sitemap to Google. That situation just proved to me once again that an XML sitemap can be a real benefit to help kick-start the Google spiders to come and visit. Now of course the ranking position was the result of my keyword research and SEO optimization I performed on her pages. She could have been #100. The point I am making is that the XML sitemap got her spidered and indexed quickly.
Anyway let me get back to discussing XML versus HTML sitemaps and the differences between the two. As a website owner, you should understand what they are, and that each one serves a very different purpose for your site.
HTML Sitemaps
An HTML Sitemap is normally a contextual hyperlink listing of the information architecture of your website. In other words, it is a listing of every page found on your site, composed of clickable links that point to every page on your site.
Most people use the Title tag for the hyperlink listing of each page. In addition, some people make theirs more like an index in a book (an A-Z listing); other people may set theirs up with brief explanations after each page listing. I kind of fall inbetween, in that I try to alphabetize the listings since it helps keep a clean format, but I also come up with creative one-line explanations that may not necessarily be the exact page title.
Let me stress that I adhere to sound SEO principles in that I utilize the keyword phrase of each page in my listings. To see what I am talking about, take a look at the sitemap I put together on my SEO consulting website: SEO-Innovation.com Sitemap
An HTML sitemap certainly helps facilitate the navigation process for the visitors to your website. Although an HTML sitemap enhances the user-friendliness of your site, it also helps the spiders that come crawling to index your site. The HTML sitemap really is like a roadmap of your entire site that you’ve kindly stuck under their noses.
Don’t ignore the effectiveness of placing a sitemap on your site. Not only does it help a bit in your rankings by providing internal cross-linking of your site, but it also helps your visitor find a page they can’t find via your navagation links, etc. and again helps the spiders know about every page on your site.
Be aware that 100 hyperlinks is the maximum for a webpage, so if you have a 300 page site, then at a minimum you’d have a three page sitemap. If it was me … I’d break it into at least 5 pages, making it easier for the human visitor and I think that an alphabetical listing would really be important, again to facilitate your visitor sifting through everything to find the page they were looking for.
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are used to faciliate the indexing process of your website. At this time, only Google and Yahoo! allow a unique XML file to be placed in your site’s directory to help with their indexing. Each search engine has instructions as to how to generate the uniquely named file, where to place it, and then how to notify them that you have carried out the procedure.
To learn more about XML sitemaps and how to go about making an XML file and submitting to Google, Yahoo and MSN, please refer to my post: Submitting XML Sitemaps
Understand this important point: Having an XML Sitemap for your site will not guarantee that your web pages will be indexed in search engines (showing up in the SERPs); nor will an XML sitemap cause a higher ranking of your pages in the search engines.
In addition, I must stress that an XML sitemap DOES NOT TAKE THE PLACE of a proper SEO-friendly site structure! If your site suffers from horrible coding issues; bad information architecture; lack of keyword focused content; or any other umpteen possible negatives … don’t keep your fingers crossed that an XML sitemap, or even an HTML sitemap, will somehow “fix” things. Because they won’t.
