SEO Tips: Help The Search Engines Understand Your Site

Help The Search Engines Understand Your Site

You've got a website, now what? You need visitors to your website aka website traffic.  SEO is where visitors type something into a search engine, and one of your website pages is returned in the results. The searcher likes what you've put in the snippet, and visits your website. Sounds easy, right? And in theory, it is! The reality can be very different. 

How do the search engines know about your website?

You want to make sure that your site can easily be indexed (found and ranked) by the search bots. In order to do this, you need to make what’s called a sitemap. A sitemap points out all of the interesting destinations that are within your website to the bot so it can be crawled and they can determine where you belong in the search results.

You don’t have to be a technical genius to create a sitemap.

If you have a WordPress website, and have Yoast SEO  or Rank Math (my current fave SEO Plugin)  installed that will automatically capture a list of the links on your site and create the sitemap for you.

Once you've got your sitemap page, you can add it to your Google Console and Google will send a bot to take a look. You can also submit your sitemap to Bing and other search engines


Pros & Cons of Helping the Search Engines find Your Site

Pros:

  • They find your site quicker
  • Increases your website traffic
  • Sitemaps help your website be understood
  • Keep developing your copywriting skills. Remember they will improve over time so give yourself time

Cons:

  • You might find it tricky to add a sitemap
  • It's not instant results

Conclusion:

Time spent on creating a sitemap will increase your website traffic over time. Without this, your site will be found (eventually) but not all the pages will be found, and the search engines may only have a glimpse of what you offer.

Additional Resources:

About the Author Sarah & Kevin Arrow

Sarah & Kevin Arrow have worked in digital marketing since 2006. They share their thoughts and tips here on this site. They'd love to help you become more visible. Book in a call or ping us a message - we're waiting to hear from you!

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