A sitemap is vital to technical SEO that helps you get your Magento website crawled, indexed, and discovered. Search engines read a sitemap to find new pages, define how often they are updated, and rank them depending on the validity of the information they provide.
However, when it comes to generating sitemaps, people get confused about what to use.
So, in this article, you’ll discover the difference between HTML and XML sitemaps, whether you should use them both, and how they impact your SEO.
What Is A Sitemap?
Let’s understand the basic concept of a sitemap before diving into the depths of this informative guide. A sitemap and SEO strategy include a list of links representing a part of the entire website. It can also include relevant information related to its content, such as content rating, last update time, run-time, creation date, and more.
One may wonder, ‘Do I need a sitemap’ for SEO; however, it’s a good idea to implement it in your SEO campaign. It helps search engines crawl and gather information regarding your web pages. Creating a solid website structure with contextual links within the paragraphs of your content is essential.
There are two types of sitemaps — XML and HTML sitemaps. SEO techniques help search engines find and index new websites, rich media content, and unlinked websites.
What is XML Sitemap?
The XML sitemap is the machine-readable sitemap created in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) that contains information about all of your website URLs along with the metadata. The metadata includes information about how important the URL is, when it was last updated, how frequently it is updated, the relation of the URL to other URLs in the sitemap, etc.
Webmasters use the XML sitemap to help search engines better understand the structure of a website and index it faster correspondingly. Moreover, all major search engines use the XML Sitemap protocol.
So, the absence of the XML sitemap can result in some pages being invisible to search crawlers.
And if spiders see nothing beyond the websites’ HTML structure, they will index and rank only those pages they can discover by crawling the HTML. Since not all of your pages are equally linked, this scenario is not an option if you want to get ranked.
That’s why Magento XML Sitemap is used mainly for search engine spiders.
How do search engines use XML sitemaps?
When a search engine’s bots come to your website and find a sitemap, they will use it to explore your content, understand its structure, and gauge its importance compared to your other content.
Google explains it best in its developer documentation: “Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important to your site and provides valuable information about these files. For example, when the page was last updated and any alternate language versions of the page.”
Do I need an XML sitemap?
A search engine can also crawl your site using external links (from other websites) and internal links (your buttons, menus, and linked text pointing to your pages). If you have a smaller website and do a great job of your internal linking, you might be fine without it.
Without a sitemap, you are leaving it up to the bots to find your content and understand it well enough to get what you’re about and rank you fairly. Bots are like people who can get fed up and leave if something isn’t clear.
If you have a new site with hardly any external links, a large website, or lots of indexed media files – we recommend an XML sitemap.
How can You find my XML sitemap?
You might already have an XML sitemap and not know it!
Although sitemaps are coded for search engines, humans can easily see them. Most websites that have an XML sitemap will place it at a URL that ends with /sitemap.xml or something similar. Here’s ours:
You can click into each group within the sitemap to view all of the content the way search engines would see it.
How can I create an XML sitemap?
As you can see from our sitemap, it’s automatically generated by the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Yoast automatically updates the sitemap when we add, remove, and edit content.
What is an HTML Sitemap?
An HTML sitemap is a sitemap written in hypertext markup language that serves as a directory of links or table of contents for your website pages. It is a page with a general overview of all website pages from which visitors can quickly jump across your site.
Though HTML sitemap doesn’t have any direct influence on search engine optimization, it is the case for a better user experience.
Since Google and other search engines do pay attention to the user-friendliness of your website, consider creating an HTML sitemap for your Magento store. It definitely won’t be redundant. However, you won’t get penalized for not having it either.
How can I create an HTML, visual, or text sitemap?
Which tool you use to create a sitemap will depend on the type of sitemap you want to use. You can make text-based sitemaps using everyday tools like Google Docs and Sheets. All you need to do is crawl your site to get a complete list of the URLs and then start sorting them into buckets.
Here’s a sneaky tip: you can also export your existing XML sitemap to create a list for plotting and updating your visual, text, or HTML sitemap.
For visual sitemaps, you’ll want a user-friendly design tool (or a designer, wink wink).
We create ours using Figma and a custom components library we’ve built within the tool to reflect the kinds of content we most often develop and design for WordPress.
You can find visual sitemap templates from popular tools like Figma Canva and Venngage.
For HTML sitemaps, you can use any number of programs that help you generate the code to upload to your site.
Do You need an HTML sitemap?
You don’t have to upload an HTML sitemap for an existing website. Unless it’s done really well, this type of sitemap rarely adds anything beneficial for search engines that they can’t get from an XML sitemap. And if you have a great UX design, your audience REALLY shouldn’t need a map to find content.
If you’re planning a rebrand, a significant content audit, a website redesign, or any other significant change to content and structure, there are so many tremendous benefits to your user experience and SEO that it’s 100% worth the effort to create a text or visual sitemap for internal teams to use.
What is HTML sitemap in SEO vs. XML sitemap — A Brief Comparison
HTML sitemaps are a crucial part of HTML sitemap SEO that are created to understand users, while XML sitemaps are specifically created for search engine spiders. The XML file helps search engine spiders quickly extract a site’s essential details.
In the context of HTML and XML sitemaps for SEO, these help users quickly find pages on your website that they have been looking for. While an XML sitemap makes your website search-engine-friendly by allowing crawlers to know which URLs to crawl, an HTML sitemap boosts your search rankings by making your site user-friendly.
After all, search engines rank websites higher when they ensure easy navigation and provide visitors with a better user experience.
HTML Sitemap Or XML Sitemap?
There’s no definite answer to this question. Understanding the difference between XML and HTML sitemap is critical, as they both help search engine spider bots crawl a website to rank higher on the SERPs. They help ensure that all your pages come with their own set of benefits and are accounted for.
XML Sitemaps Benefits
An effectively structured sitemap XML file is essential as it informs search bots about your website’s pages, including its homepage and other internal pages. It also helps connect website pages efficiently.
Suppose you have many pages and posts that are not linked to the site’s homepage. In that case, you’ll need to go about generating sitemaps tailored for Google and other search engines to know about your website’s content. It’s also important to note that websites that create and utilize a content management system to publish new content often syndicate content on social media and other platforms.
These sites may republish content without permission from the author. Both are significant instances of content duplication, which Google is strictly against. XML sitemaps help tackle content duplication problems by notifying Google that your content is original.
Also, XML sitemaps ensure that the essential pages on your site are represented accurately.
XML Sitemap Limitations
Keeping the SEO benefits of XML sitemaps aside, they also come with a few limitations.
- Indexing
An XML sitemap file recommends URLs for the search engine to crawl and index. But there’s no guarantee that the search engine will index or even crawl every page.
- Link Authority
Search engines won’t necessarily rank a URL if they only come across it. Unlike external links, the URLs in an XML sitemap doesn’t generally convey link authority, whereas those in an HTML sitemap do.
HTML Sitemaps Benefits
An HTML sitemap is also needed to improve your website’s search engine optimization ranking. The links help visitors navigate your site and understand what the site’s pages are about. This enhances the user experience, making navigation a more straightforward process (min read). Every website user will go to your sitemap and click on the link, and they’ll be taken to the specific linked page of your website.
An HTML sitemap is a powerful tool for large websites with over 2,000 internal links and pages. It can improve the site structure and add value by equally distributing links on every page. In other words, it distributes page ranks evenly to every page of your website for enhanced SEO rankings for your site’s content.
HTML Sitemap Limitations
HTML sitemaps add value to SEO campaigns by increasing the number of internal linking opportunities, which naturally poses the question of whether an HTML sitemap is necessary in all scenarios — one of the reasons why an XML sitemap is preferred.
- Navigation
The primary site navigation doesn’t link to all new pages of the website. A few sections or pages of the site remain inaccessible to the search engine.
- Not For Small Websites
HTML sitemaps are primarily helpful for large websites. They aren’t ideal for a website that doesn’t post much and has only a few pages.
Difference between HTML and XML sitemap purposes
The XML’s purpose is to help search engines find your site and determine the importance of the pages of your website (subpages, too) so more users can benefit from using your site. This is mission-critical for both large and small websites. Google Search Console, Yahoo, and Bing aren’t designed to make guesses about content that exists on your website. However, search engines are significant at offering what they do know your site contains. You just have to tell them what that content is for it to be effective.
On the other hand, HTML sitemaps are used to help human eyes take in information about the setup of a site and provide easy navigation to the available pages. HTML contains actual links that can be clicked to get you anywhere within a site and can include any other information the site owner and designers think the user should know.
Conclusion on XML vs HTML Sitemaps
Exploring the difference between XML and HTML sitemaps reveals that the former allows users to understand your website content, while the latter provides tags catering to search engines. You can manage your sitemap update frequency by updating your XML sitemap when adding new content or publishing content on the site.
In the ongoing debate on which is better, we’d recommend using both as they help improve SEO ranking. It will allow Google to find and navigate your website pages more efficiently.
There may not be solid evidence that a sitemap will help your website or online business grow. But given the chance, it might be worth building an optimal sitemap. In addition to that, there are no risks of penalization involved.
