Think of a sitemap as a GPS system for search engines. You want search engines to index every word, image and video on your website and a sitemap will help search engines do this. A sitemap is of vital importance to every website. It is a list all the pages throughout your website that can be submitted to search engines. Your sitemap also helps the overall search engine optimisation of your website by making sure that all the pages can be found.

You create your sitemap using XML coding. Once you have created the sitemap, you can then submit to Google, Yahoo and Bing in their respective webmaster tools area. It may take awhile for search engine robots to index your pages, so be patient. The robots are not guaranteed to index all of your pages but once you have submitted your sitemap they should index the majority of pages.

If you don’t have a sitemap on your website I recommend that you implement one straight away. There are plug-ins that you can get for websites to automatically create them for you or you can do it manually.