What is HTML Sitemap?
A human-readable page listing important site sections for users and crawlers. Secondary to XML sitemaps and navigation, but useful on large or deep sites as a discovery safety net.
Related terms
XML Sitemap
A machine-readable list of canonical URLs worth crawling, optionally with last-modified dates. One file holds 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites segment by template or locale.
Site Architecture
How pages connect: hubs, categories, and link paths from the homepage down. Good architecture keeps priority pages shallow, clustered by topic, and reachable through descriptive links.
Crawl Depth
Clicks from the homepage to reach a page. Deep pages get crawled less often and inherit less prominence; priority content belongs within a few hops with internal-link support.
Technical SEO
The crawling, indexing, rendering, and performance work that lets search engines reach, understand, and serve your pages. It covers directives, architecture, speed, and structured data rather than words on the page.
Crawling
How search-engine bots discover pages by following links, sitemaps, and directives. If a URL is never crawled, it cannot be indexed no matter how good its content is.
Crawl Budget
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, driven by server capacity and demand signals. Large or slow sites must spend it on indexable, valuable URLs.