Both consumers and search engines value sitemaps as key website elements. It aids in their page discovery on your website.

Extensible mark up language(XML) sitemaps are crucial for optimizing your website for search engines, but it's as critical to keep your website user-friendly. 

An HTML sitemap can help with that.

What Is an HTML Sitemap?

A file called an HTML sitemap contains a list of all the pages on your website. This is intended to make it simpler for your visitors to navigate. Consider it to be similarto a book's table of contents, where a list of chapters and subchapters can be found.

The primary pages and subpages of your website are similarly shown in an HTML sitemap. ensuring that users may find what they're seeking for with extreme ease.

Users should ideally be able to use your navigation menu to find the material they require. To structure your HTML sitemap, though, treat it like a directory for your website.

Are HTML Sitemaps Beneficial for SEO?

Although an HTML sitemap is primarily intended for human users, some SEO specialists contend that it can help raise your placement in SERPs. This is so that Google can more easily identify and crawl every page on your website thanks to an HTML sitemap's internal linkages.

Additionally, when ranking websites, search engines like Google take accessibility and user experience into account. Your website's accessibility and usability might increase its visibility in search results, therefore having an HTML sitemap may help.

Therefore, if you have a big website with a complicated page hierarchy, an HTML sitemap might have a bigger effect on your SEO. It might make it simpler for search engines to classify your material.

Benefits of an HTML Sitemap

You might be perplexed as to why you should bother with an HTML sitemap given that search engines can crawl XML sitemaps. Optimizing for crawlers isthe key to ranking in search engines, right?

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Not exactly. Remember that while ranking websites, search engines also take into account user experience.

You may improve user experience by making your website more user-friendly by adding an HTML sitemap. It increases the likelihood that you will rank better.

An HTML sitemap offers the following benefits  in addition to making your website more user-friendly:

• Organizes very huge websites: An HTML sitemap essentially functions as a directory for webpages, enabling website owners to arrange their massive and intricate websites.

• Facilitates the discovery of your pages by search engines: Search engines can more simply and rapidly find your material if you have an HTML sitemap that is well-organized. therefore they can crawl it.

• Your HTML sitemap: also enables you to add internal links, which are vital for SEO, to your sites.

• Site navigation is improved: Your website's overall navigation will be enhanced by having an HTML sitemap. by compiling a list of every page on your website. Therefore, consumers may simply find what they need.

An HTML Sitemap: How to Do It

A number of plugins let you add an HTML sitemap to your website. It's possible that you already have access to this capability if you use an SEO solution like Yoast or All In One SEO.

With the help of this sitemap plugin, you can quickly and without any coding knowledge change your HTML sitemap inside the Block Editor. Additionally, you may show your sitemap wherever you like on your website by using the short codes that are given.

Let's now examine the basic stages involved in utilizing the Simple Sitemap plugin to produce an HTML sitemap for your WordPress website.

1. Activate the Theme Editor

Once the plugin has been installed and activated, go to the page on your website where you want the sitemap to appear. This might be your footer or a specific sitemap page. Our sitemap will be moved to the footer to improve accessibility.

Using the page builder you employed to design your website, such as our Divi page builder, you can probably modify your footer. If you're unsure how to add your sitemap, you should see the page builder's manual.

2. Insert the Basic Sitemap Block

There are, as you can see, two possibilities. While the Simple Sitemap Group block shows a list of your posts organized by taxonomy, the Simple Sitemap block adds a standard HTML sitemap to your page.

Your parent sites and subpages are listed hierarchically using the Simple Sitemap block. Each item has a link to the pertinent content, as you can see. Users can view any page in your sitemap by simply clicking on it.

3. Change the Design of Your Sitemap

There are a few design options available in the Simple Sitemap plugin's free version.

You can decide which article types to include in the sitemap, for instance. Additionally, you have the choice to arrange your pages according to title, date, author, and other factors. More layout possibilities are available if you upgrade to Simple Sitemap Pro. Additionally, you can choose to remove specific posts from the sitemap.

Conclusion

HTML sitemaps provide a lot of advantages. By making content easier to obtain and navigate, they can enhance user experience. Additionally, they make it easier for web crawlers to index content more rapidly.

Fortunately, you don't need any technical knowledge to install an HTML sitemap to your website. To add this function to any area of your website, such as your footer or a specific page, utilize a plugin like Simple Sitemap.

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