So I get asked every now and then if I have any advice for writing html sitemaps. Some of you out there are probably saying that the navigation should be clear enough that a sitemap isn’t needed – but hey. I like sitemaps and certainly on some sites that are pretty incomprehensible, I do most of my navigation via their sitemap. Here are my top tips for creating a sitemap.
1.) Try to limit the number of links on any page of your site to around 100 links. This applies to your sitemap too.
2.) The follow up to this then – is if you have a site with 6000 products, please don’t list them all on one sitemap page. If you think it is important to have all of the products listed in the sitemap – you’re going to need a hierarchical sitemap with more than one page – alternatively, you could just keep your sitemap to the top level of navigation, essentially not listing every single product on your database. If you have frequently changing stock but the sitemap html is manually updated, it’s probably best to leave the products out otherwise the sitemap will spend most of its time being out of date.
3.) Bringing me neatly on to “Remember to update the sitemap”. If you’ve updated your website with new pages but the sitemap still points to old pages, with out of date information, then these pages are still going to be indexed.
4.) And finally – use descriptive key phrases in the anchor text of the navigation. OK it might not be a particularly strong place from an SEO point of view to get good anchor text links in, but it’s good for usability, and if your primary navigation can’t use keywords, then it’s worth a go here.
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