So you’re all excited. You’ve created this amazing website. You’ve written brilliant content. Added gorgeous images and now you’re done.
Yes you are done. If that’s all you plan on doing with your site, hoping that people will find you, then you might as well call it a day.
Don’t leave anything to chance. There are ways to ensure your site is being indexed. You don’t want to be just another website that no one knows exists.
Adding an XML Sitemap to your website will insure that Google, Bing and Yahoo will index your site. (READ: IMPROVE Search Engine Rankings!!!)
Why have an XML Sitemap?
- It will improve your visibility on the Internet.
- It provides search engines with a list of URLs that you want them to crawl. If Google can’t find you then no one can find you.
- It enables search engines to index your entire site without skipping any pages.
While it would be nice, an XML Sitemap won’t have an immediate impact your search engine rankings. But, because it encourages search engines to ping your site at regular intervals in time you may see an uptick in your ranking. The XML Sitemap ensures that you remain on the radar.
Adding an XML Sitemap
Don’t let the concept of adding an XML Sitemap intimidate you. It is intimidating if you think that you actually have to manually create the sitemap and your XML skills may not be quite up to par. It would be great if we all had learned to code in high school. Like taking French or Spanish.
I’ve found if you just do a little research there’s usually a relatively stress free way to get things done.
As if WordPress wasn’t wonderful enough…
There is a WordPress plug-in for nearly every function needed on a website. And if a plug-in doesn’t exist you know someone is in the process of developing one. Good news for those of us who didn’t grow up writing code.
The Google Sitemap Generator‘plug-in will create your XML sitemap quickly and easily. All you need to do is install and activate. Really. That’s it. Once installed it automatically pings major search engines alerting them to new content or updates to your site.
If you’re not familiar with the process to install and activate plug-ins check out the WPUniversity Plugin Install Guide
