| 🎯 What’s the goal? For webmaster/admin to have a visual clue about the pages that are more than 3-click from the homepage. | ⚠️ Why does it matter? Keeping your pages at a maximum of 3 clicks from the reach will encourage your audiences to discover the content of your website, letting them comfortably navigate your Site. |
| 🏁 What’s the result? Visual representation of your site accessible for your webmaster/admin. | ⌚ When do you do this? When your website begins to have a larger number of pages. |
| ✅ Any special requirements? N/D | 🙋♂️Who should do it? Person in charge of managing your website. |
👉 Where this is done: On the visual sitemaps page.
⏳ How long will this take? about 10 minutes
Let’s get started, in 10-min your audiences will be able to navigate your website easily
Environment setup:
- We recommend you to use Google Chrome to navigate the web.
Creating Visual Sitemaps account
- Go to www.visualsitemaps.com.
- Click on “Get Started for Free”.
- You can choose to sign up by entering your Email address and coming up with a password (1) or you can Log in with your Google or Facebook account (2).
- No matter which method you choose above, in the next step you will have to type in your full name (1), choose your role (2) and fill in with your workspace name (3).
While you are choosing your role, use a drop-down list
- Click on “Next”.
- Now, you will be redirected to your account main panel.
Creating your visual sitemap
- Click on the “Sitemaps” tab.
- Then, choose “Create Sitemap”.
- Since this is your 1st time using Visualsitemaps, you will be presented with some tutorial messages. We recommend you watch the introductory video about how to use Visualsitemaps. In the case that you skipped it, here on THIS link to watch it. Click on “Next” to start using the service.
- Start by typing in your site “Url”.
- Set the “Max Pages” limit. – If you enter 100 it will crawl up to 100 pages and STOP. If you leave it blank, it will crawl up to up to 50 pages and PAUSE. (Note that the free plan has some limits, such as max number of pages of 50).
- Set “Max Depth” how many levels should the crawler go into. Example:yoursite.com/products/shoes/men // Men’s depth = 3.
- “Name” your sitemap.
- You can choose to review “Advanced Settings”.
- Those options can help you personalize your initial sitemap.
- The URL of an XML sitemap. Visualsiteaps will just crawl URLs found in the XML sitemap, links from the pages will not be followed.
- CSV file where the first column are URLs. The app will just crawl URLs found in the file, links from the pages will not be followed. Remember to use “ , ” as delimiter and “ ” ” as an escape character. CSV may use headers as the first row.
- Type in any directories you want to exclude from the crawl (from your sitemap).
- Type a keyword to exclude any URL that contains it.
- You can add any directories that are not included in your XML sitemap.
- Type a keyword to include any URL that contains it in the crawling process.
- Type in a password if you want to crawl a password-protected site.
- Click on “Crawl Now”.
- You can check the status of the crawling by looking at the dot on your dashboard. Orange means that the crawl is in progress.
- Once the “Status dot” is green, your sitemap is ready.
- Click on “View”.
- And there is your sitemap visualization.
- You can edit every piece of your sitemap by changing the title of the piece (1), duplicating it (2) or adding a folder or another screenshot (3) – note that those are paid features, not included within the Free Plan – for editing the Visual Sitemap we highly recommend you to choose the paid option.
- By clicking on the circle at the upper right corner of the block…
…You will have the option to add a tag to that block (or more if you select them with the same method).
Simply, create a new tag, that will help you manage your sitemap.
Then you will be able to filter all block with a particular tag by utilizing the “All Tags” filter in the upper right corner.
- In the lower-left corner, you will be able to choose the option to export your visual sitemap to either PDF, JSON or CSV file.
There you have it. Visualisation of your sitemap. Graphical representation of all your pages will help you and your admin/webmaster to compose your site in a way that will be efficient and audience-friendly.
