Why Submitting a Sitemap to Google is Crucial to Getting Traffic to Your Site!
Search Engine Optimization and Sitemaps
There is a common misconception people have about having a website and having people actually see your website.
When I started getting involved in SEO, I was blown away by the missed opportunities and the simple things that I see now as an absolute must when having a website.
Some of these include:
Google Analytics (or some sort of way to track visitors)
Google Webmasters (also known as Google Search Console).
Some have heard of Analytics, but it seems more common that Webmasters gets forgotten when it is equally, if not more important than Analytics when starting out your website.
If you have never heard of Google Webmasters than most likely you have never heard of a Sitemap. Let me explain both… A sitemap is quite simply, a map of your website. It shows search engines (Google, Bing) your most important pages and blog posts, and the kind of content that is on those pages. It basically tells these search engines what you are all about, whether that be photography or fitness etc.
According to Google”
Now Google Webmasters is the place you go to “submit a sitemap”. It also has tons of other crazy tools such as page speed load times, Search Queries and lots of other valuable tools I will cover in a later post.
Why is this so crucial?
Here is where some get frustrated with having a website. They put a ton of work and energy, or even spend money to have someone else build this site, and then
No one ever sees your Website!
Even Google themselves have said “a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site…”
Unless you say “Check out siegedigitalmarketing.com“, or your spending a ton on advertising, it just doesn’t happen. See Google isn’t some all powerful tool that just knows immediately when a new website is created. It is constantly searching the web to find relevant information for its customers.
After all, you want to find what you are looking for on the front page of Google, not page 130 right? It finds these websites through links from social media and other websites which can take a long time to find you.
By submitting a sitemap you skip a significant amount of time waiting for Google to “find you” and you simply tell Google you exist. Makes sense right? When you submit a sitemap you are directly saying “Hi, I exist, and I talk about building online businesses through videos, blogs and other resources” or whatever your content is about.
From here Google takes a significantly shorter period of time to crawl (look at) your website and then it figures out what your all about, and it starts indexing you (placing you in google searches) to see how valuable your content really is to people.
Less than 5 minutes of setup is all it takes to submit a sitemap for your website, and it is one of the best decisions you can make for faster organic growth.
Check out google.com/webmasters
How can I setup and Submit a Sitemap for my website?
Stay Tuned…