So, you already have an XML sitemap to help your website visitors navigate through your site, by presenting URLs and a complete map of all the Web pages; and now you’re not investing into an HTML sitemap because someone has told you it isn’t necessary anymore. If you think you’ve made the right decision, we’ll be glad to help you know that an HTML sitemap is worth having. If you’re not ready to believe us, listed below are five reasons that’ll certainly help you understand why you should be adding an updated HTML sitemap for your website.
An HTML sitemap is an organized blueprint of the website
Your HTML sitemap will be an architectural blueprint for your website. It becomes a project management tool by overseeing the structure and connections between pages and sub-pages. It ensures a clean hierarchy and taxonomy for your site. All in all, a good HTML sitemap is a well-organized schedule that makes it easy for one and all.
An HTML sitemap helps user find what they are looking for
You may be a small website now, but you’re certain to grow in the future, aren’t you? You may add on products, categories, departments, or in any way expand your portfolio. New ideas can help your site grow in both length and breadth. Then, your visitors may be confused as to where to go, with all the immense amount of information on your site. An HTML sitemap here can prove to be useful in just the same way as a map would help you navigate through the roads. When users fail to find the page they are searching for on your site, they’ll turn to this sitemap that’ll prove to be a directory to help them find what they’re looking for.
An HTML sitemap can highlight the website’s purpose
An HTML sitemap can define your website’s specific value in the form of a content-based document. Plus, using the most unique and relevant keywords, the results can be enhanced. The sitemap can also prove to be an easy alternative for anchor text, which otherwise has no guarantee of being valued by search engines.
An HTML sitemap can boost incoming organic traffic
An HTML sitemap can reflect a visitor’s journey and guide them right from research to the purchase, by finding ideal connections that can address how visitors may look for things. This raises the organic search visibility of Web pages, which proves to be a significant benefit for deeper pages on a site that don’t receive many internal links. An HTML sitemap thus also helps in bringing in increased traffic.
An HTML sitemap can boost your rankings on SERPs
With an XML sitemap in place, you’re certainly letting search engines and website visitors know about all the pages that exist on your site, by giving a full menu of available pages. But, this is just about it. Here, there is no guarantee that Google bots will index every page of your website. This means that an XML sitemap may not have any significant effect on your rankings. But, with an HTML sitemap in place, you can direct the bots to get the entire view of your site, and consider all the pages, which will increase the likeliness of Google bots to follow the page navigation laid out, and index each page.
As you can see, an HTML sitemap is not useful only for the users; it adds to the benefit of the crawlers too. Also, there is no limit to how big the sitemap can be. You can have millions of pages indexed and crawled through an HTML sitemap! With this sitemap, you can therefore boost your rankings on SERPs too! This is the reason why every SEO company in Bangalore agrees that an HTML sitemap is a win-win situation from all ends.