Basics of HTML Site Maps - How to create one.

HTML Site Maps

The HTML sitemap takes the navigation layout of your existing website and breaks it down in a basic form.

It is a bulleted outline text version of the site navigation. The anchor text displayed in the outline is linked to the page it references. Site visitors can go to the Sitemap to locate a topic they are unable to find by searching the site or navigating through the site menus. The HTML site map is effective for accessibility, navigation, and internal linking purposes.

In its most basic form, the HTML Site Map page contains a list of standard hypertext links to all the pages on a website. This list should include links to the home page, to all the main pages and sub-pages on the site, and to any other pages on the site that might not be accessible through the main navigation, such as a Privacy Policy or Customer Service page.

What an HTML site map does is essentially create a page that links to all of your internal pages. This is good for increasing SEO on a smaller level, since it places more internal links on your pages and in turn improves your domain and page authority.

How to Make an HTML site Map ?

On WordPress, making an HTML sitemap is as simple as creating a page and typing whichever links you would like on the site. You can make a sitemap that includes blog posts, helpful resources, or simply a site map that goes over the basic “parent navigation” items from your website’s menu.

From there, you simply link each piece (perhaps in bulleted form) to the proper content of that page. For example, if your About page is yourwebsite.com/about, that is the link you want to use in the site map.

You can also create your Site Map yourself, by following below steps;

1. Create an HTML page for your site map.

2. Add a link to EVERY page on your site that you want people to know about. There are lots of ways to design a site map page, but simple is better. Often an outline format broken into sections works best.

• If you have many Web pages, limit links on any page to a maximum of 100. You may need to break your site map into multiple pages, perhaps by product category or type of service.

(Note: If you have confidential pages or pages you do not want indexed, simply leaving them off a site map will not stop them from being indexed. You will need to take additional steps to completely block search engine robots, such as password protection or a robots.txt file.)

• For every link on your site map, include a brief description of the Web page the link goes to. This definitely helps visitors find the right page.

• To also help rank those pages better in search results, use your proven keywords for the target page in the description and in the anchor text. But be sure you don’t abuse this: no keyword stuffing or trickery here — make it relevant.

3. Now add a link to your site map page on every other page in your Web site. That way no matter where a visitor is, they can always get to every other page by going to your site map. And, search engine robots can also find all of your other pages, no matter which page they enter your site through.

4. Be sure to update the site map when you add new Web pages. Also, update the description if a Web page changes substantially.

Site maps for large or complex Websites

If you have a huge Web site and the prospect of creating and maintaining a similarly large site map is stopping you, then consider some of the various software and online services that can help automate this process. If you use Adobe® Dreamweaver,® extensions are available to help. If you’re using other development software, there are also online services and standalone products that can help.

Some of the basic guidelines for a good Site Map are;

1. Use consistent, fully-qualified URLs. Google will crawl your URLs exactly as listed. For instance, if your site is at http://www.example.com/, don't specify a URL as /http://example.com/ (without the www) or ./mypage.html (a relative URL).
2. Don't include session IDs from URLs in your sitemap to reduce duplicate crawling of those URLs.
3. Point out translated versions of a URL to Google for crawling and indexing by listing the canonical URLs for each language in your sitemap file and by using hrf lang annotations.
4. Encoding: Sitemap files must be UTF-8 encoded, and URLs escaped appropriately.
5. Break up large sitemaps into a smaller sitemaps to prevent your server from being overloaded if Google requests your sitemap frequently. A sitemap file can't contain more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB uncompressed.
6. Index File; Use a sitemap index file to list all your sitemaps and submit this single file to Google rather than submitting individual sitemaps.
7. Use recommended canonicalization methods to tell Google if your site is accessible on both the www and non-www versions of your domain. You need to submit a sitemap for only your preferred domain.
8. Familiarize yourself with our Webmaster Guidelines, and our SEO Starter Guide if you're considering hiring a consultant to help you optimize your sitemaps. It can also be useful to check with colleagues with similar sites or businesses to get the most of your sitemap. 

Read More on XML Site Maps and,

Difference b/w HTML & XML Site Maps