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:
Cons:
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.
