How to create an HTML sitemap

What is a ‘sitemap’? 

A sitemap is a simple web page on your site that includes the active subsites that you need to have monitored by Siteimprove. It does not have to include all of the pages of your site because the crawler will find the pages that your subsites link to. (But it can include all of the pages if you prefer.)

For example, let’s say our subsite, plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/hydrangeas acts as a landing page that links to these pages:

  • plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/hydrangeas/oakleaf

  • plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/hydrangeas/climbing

  • plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/hydrangeas/mophead

  • plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/hydrangeas/lacecap

Although we can list these child pages in our sitemap for Siteimprove’s crawler, we only have to include plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/hydrangeas in our sitemap because the crawler will find the child pages through the links.

What does a sitemap look like? 

In our example, we'll create a subsite using the URL, plantsaregreat.berkeley.edu/sitemap. This URL must never change because then it will stop working in Siteimprove.

We'll include only the 2nd level pages that function as subsites because these link out to all the 3rd level pages, which link out to 4th level pages and so on. 

If you have orphaned pages that are not linked to anywhere, Siteimprove will not find them. Make sure orphaned pages are listed in the sitemap as well.

Heading 1 (page title): Plants are Great - Sitemap

  • Hydrangeas 

  • Succulents

  • Cacti

  • Ficuses

  • Ferns

  • Azaleas

  • Flowering perennials

  • Roses

[Note: This example doesn’t use actual links because these aren’t real web pages, but you will need to use active hyperlinks.]

Once your sitemap is ready, submit a Siteimprove Support Request so we can add it as the indexing URL for your site.

If you decide to include all of the pages in your sitemap (or even just the 2nd and 3rd level child pages), there are free tools that can help you create a more detailed sitemap.

What about xml sitemaps?

These are different from html sitemaps. Siteimprove uses these too, but for the purposes of replacing a home page, we want to use an html sitemap.

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