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Many consider HTML sitemaps are something of a a dinosaur, a throw back to when search engines didn't exist and the directory style layout was the norm. Is it really great for a user when a search box would be a quicker way to your website's content? A YouTube video from Google employee Matt Cutts throws this negative theory into doubt. What is an HTML Sitemap?A sitemap is a categorised list of links to all pages on a website. Before the advent of search, it was a way users could find pages not easily accessible on large websites. It can be time consuming, but everything is there, somewhere! An HTML sitemap then is simply a webpage like any other. It can be slightly fancier, with code in to automatically generate the sitemap when new pages are added, but essentially it is just a page of links. The alternative: XML SitemapsXML stands for Extensible Markup Language and represents rules for the encoding electronic documents. All you need to know is this is what search engines universally accept as a a form of sitemap submission. So, this form of sitemap isn't user focused, but search engine focused. The idea of a sitemap from a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view is that it allows search engines to view all pages and index them, with the possible consequences of good rankings for these newly found web pages. More for SEO's sake then, HTML Sitemaps have lingered on because search engines should find all of the website's pages. It's important to remember that an XML sitemap is only useful if you submit it to all search engines. If you only submit it to Google, then Yahoo and Bing will still only index your website the normal way.
What Matt Cutts saysProof that an HTML sitemap is still worthwhile is shown by the fact that Google's still has a Sitemap of it's own. To summarise Matt Cutts' comments in the YouTube video, he explains that both HTML and XML sitemaps are good, but HTML has the edge. This is because it's considered best for users, which is what Google will say about pretty much all SEO strategies - anything you should do should not be to the deficit of the user experience. Matt mentioned that Google does not guarantee to crawl all links just because you have submitted an XML sitemap. This provides added motivation to create both versions. Creating an XML SitemapFortunately creating an XML sitemap is very easy due to the amount of automated XML sitemap generators there out there. Once created, you will need to then submit through Google Webmaster's, Bing's Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer.
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