Create HTML Sitemaps - HTML Sitemap Tutorial

Our sitemaps tutorial and its examples assumes you are using A1 Sitemap Generator for creating HTML sitemaps. This sitemapper software has lots of options for configuring your HTML sitemaps, but we will be using the default settings unless otherwise noted. If you are looking for a complete overview of the HTML sitemapper tools and options available, you should check our article about advanced HTML sitemaps.

Before creating your HTML sitemap, you must first crawl your website to find all pages. A1 Sitemap Generator has many settings including support for no-follow and no-index meta tags, robots.txt, login systems etc. However, with the vast majority of websites, you will not need to touch any of these settings. Just enter your website root path and start scanning!

After the website crawl is done, you get presented all pages found in a tree outline. For each page you can view details such as incoming and outgoing links, validate your website for HTML and CSS errors etc. After viewing the website scan results, press Create sitemap tab.

You can find even more website and link checker tools in A1 Website Analyzer.

After choosing HTML template sitemap click Build now. When using the default configuration, this will create a HTML sitemap which can validate against HTML/CSS error checkers. However, it is possible to completely customize the template used, e.g. to create XHTML or HTML sitemaps using your website layout.

If your website uses a server-side language such as PHP or ASP, you can still create HTML sitemaps using the template system. The important thing is not the language used at server-side, but instead what gets outputted to internet browsers and search engine crawlers, i.e. in this case HTML.

You can also control how the HTML sitemap is created, e.g. maximum amount of links each sitemap page can have, if to use columns and how link anchor text is chosen.

After creating the HTML sitemap you are shown the output, most often HTML source, but it depends on the template used. You can also view the created HTML sitemap files in various internet browsers.

All you need now is to:

• Upload HTML sitemap.
• Link to your HTML sitemap from prominent places in your website. This helps:
  • Human visitors to navigate your website.
  Website pages get some link juice and getting found + indexed by search engines.

If you want details on how A1 Sitemap Generator can help you create HTML sitemaps optimized for website visitors including search engines, you should check part 2 article about how to generate HTML sitemaps. Read about splitting HTML sitemaps into multiple pages, making sure all links have relevant anchor text, configuring look and feel of created HTML sitemaps and how to ensure search engines rank and index more pages.