Including a Sitemap Page

A website sitemap page, which is not to be confused with a sitemap.xml page for search engine crawling purposes, has a number of benefits to your website for visitors and your search engine rankings.

A sitemap page can greatly add to the usability and accessibility for your visitors, allowing them to find many of your website pages which they may not have found otherwise. It also gives Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits as well, in the form of internal text links to various pages of your site with ideally keyword specific anchor text.

What to Include in Your Sitemap

Although it may make sense to include every page you have in your sitemap page, for some websites with say over 50 – 100 pages it just wouldn’t be very feasible and more than likely wouldn’t make usability and accessibility any easier. Therefore it is better to only include your main pages and most important subpages, for example if you have a blog you wouldn’t include every posts page you have, but you could include your categories with your other main pages.

Structuring Your Sitemap

It is important to structure your sitemap correctly to ensure that you are still maintaining one of the main points of having a sitemap in the first place, usability and accessibility. There are many different possible layouts that you can have for your sitemap, the main point is to keep it as simple as possible, and there is really no need for nice graphics and images simple formatted text is fine.

It is also important to have some order to your sitemap, arranging your pages alphabetical will definitely make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for, or you could even try breaking them up into categories. Have a look at my sitemap if you would like to see an example.

If you’re stuck for ideas on how to structure your sitemap, have a look at some other websites related to yours and see how they have structured there sitemap, try and get some inspiration.

You may also like to write descriptions under each of your sitemap page or category links to help your visitors understand what each of your pages are about.

Maintaining Your Sitemap

It’s important to maintain your websites sitemap with new pages your have added to ensure you are continually improving your sitemap’s accessibility. Just as importantly if not more important you should also make sure you remove any pages that no longer exists. It would be extremely frustrating for a user to come to your sitemap find a page that they are looking for then find out that it has been removed and is now a deadlink. It is also not taken well by search engine bots that come to crawl your website and find deadlinks. So make sure you keep your sitemap maintained.

An additional tip with sitemaps is to also add the same content to your custom 404 page, this way if someone happens to type in the wrong address of one of your pages they will still have access to all of your other pages instead of just a plain error page.

A sitemap is a page that takes very little effort to setup initially and in some cases the setup and maintaining of it can even be automated, however if you leave it till your number of pages grow too much it can get quite time consuming. So even if the benefits for your site are only minimal it is still worthwhile to develop your own website sitemap sooner rather than later.

If you want to find out what other standard pages your website will benefit from have, check out ‘Web Business Pages You Should Have’.