I set up a sitemap on my website a while ago, and it involved putting some thought into how I was going to present it, and what should be on there. I considered putting descriptions for each of my pages, but then felt that it would make the page too long. Anyone going to look at a sitemap page probably isn’t going to do a lot of reading, and it’s probably mostly used for quick reference and navigation.
I did include links to different sub-parts of my pages for a couple of reasons: it matches the mini-menus at the tops of my pages, and I figured if someone is looking for something specific, that might jog their memory.
What do you think a sitemap should do, and how should it look for you? Do you know of any standards for sitemaps that others should be aware of? Do you prefer alphabetical site indexes instead? I want to hear your thoughts!
I guess I have two. Since my site is made from Wordpress and a directory script cobbled together both scripts generate a sitemap for themselves but not for both scripts combined. The WordPress sitemap is for bots but the directory sitemap is HTML, meant for humans and is actually quite useful. Thankfully, it’s auto-generated because it would be a pain to maintain manually.
I like HTML sitemaps because they can really help human visitors on large sites, plus bots can crawl them and maybe help you get more pages indexed.
I did not think about adding a link to every page on my website. That’s a good idea, and a lot of sites do have it in their footer.
Yeah I thought about auto-generating mine, but my pages aren’t, well, uniform really, so I’d have to do some serious PHP mess to get it all into a good, consistent format. Maybe someday when I have enough time to throw into it!