Is it worth building an html sitemap

[surfgatinho]

I was thinking about building an html sitemap for some of my sites.

This would be purely an SEO exercise as Google reaches nearly all of my content pretty quickly as it goes on my home page first.

My reasoning is it would allow me to rebalance the SE juices around the site a bit and also allow me to reinforce the keywords I want for those pages.

Is it worth my time?

[Hissingsid]

I would study the likely effect on PR sculpture before I did this.

I do have some sites that do very well and have html site maps. Some blog/cms apps have plugins to do this automatically and I have one site that is #1 for its target terms that uses a script that automatically creates a site map in Textpattern.

Having said that I would recomend that you either understand what you are doing and the possible risks.

Cheers

Sid

[g1smd]

Yes - even if only to give a site overview to your human visitors.

[lavazza]

Yes - even if only to give a site overview to your human visitors.

Indeed :)

I use an automagical online sitemap generator that creates a bunch of Google/Yahoo-compatible XML file, a ROR file (allegedly compatible with any search engine), a plain text listing of all pages, AND a simple HTML file

The HTML file is populated with data extracted from the <title> tags and quite often (especially for sites that I am a bit slack in maintaining) it can be quite a 'surprise' to see how outdated the <title> tags are... As this is (or should be) the data used by Google in its SERPs, I think its well worth the minimal time and bandwidth

[surfgatinho]

I'm not thinking of this from a human point of view. More (to quote Hissingsid) as a PR sculpting exercise and perhaps most importantly to emphasise KW anchor text.

With that in mind, is it a worthwhile exercise?

[CainIV]

Absolutely. the bigger the website, the better the html sitemap needs to be to drive spiders into internal pages that might not have direct links to them.

[Robert Charlton]

Think sitemaps... a structured series of linking pages... rather than just one page that globally links to all pages in the site.