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Site Map

What is a site map and how does it affect our website’s indexing?

A site map is intended to make it easier for search engines to index our website. But why do we need this indexing in the first place?

Let’s assume you have a blog integrated with your website, and you publish new articles on it with the goal of getting Google to display them in search results and attract organic traffic that may eventually generate leads or paying clients (that’s what we’re doing all this for, right)?

In order for this to be possible, your post must first be indexed by Google’s bots, which periodically scan websites looking for new content worth indexing. But how does the bot discover that a new article has been published on your blog?

• Through internal linking from other posts on your blog that have already been indexed
• Through a link in your blog’s sidebar to recent articles
• Through adding a site map to Google Search Console

The first two examples are essentially just waiting for the bot to show up and notice the new post; I think it’s not worth relying on chance, but rather approach this systematically.

To have your blog posts indexed quickly, you should create a site map. However, generating a site map alone is not enough.

You should enable a free service that will give you many more benefits than just fast indexing of new posts on your blog: Google Search Console. You can add your site map to the console and Google’s bot will periodically visit it and index new articles on your blog.

Look at this screenshot: the files for this website’s site map have been added and Google is reading them cyclically. You can see that the last read was on December 31, 2022; you don’t need to rely on chance waiting for the bot to show up and index your map.

By adding a site map to Google Search Console, you guarantee that it will be automatically downloaded by Google as soon as it’s updated on your website.

How does a site map work?

A site map is essentially an index of subpages of a specific type. For example, if you have a WordPress website, you can install a module that automatically generates a site map in an XML file with different types of content; in another file, posts from your blog can be added; and so on. In the case of WordPress, adding new blog posts to the site map’s XML file is fully automated, and all you need to do is add new entries to your blog.

When the XML file for the site map is updated with a new post, Google Search Console will notice this change and send the bot to scan your website and add the new post to Google’s index.

A site map itself is useless if it’s not read by Google; therefore, it’s worth registering a free account in Google Search Console and adding your site and site map. The console has many other useful features.

Look at this screenshot: you can see how many URLs from one of our websites were processed by Google today, including new TAGs that are automatically created when we add tags to posts on the blog; these TAGs are also indexed by Google, which is amazing.

A site map helps with fast indexing of new subpages on your website, and without indexing, there will be no visibility in Google’s rankings. The goal of creating a new article on the blog is to generate organic traffic that may eventually lead to leads or paying clients – this is the essence of blogging.

This is necessary for website SEO; without content, you won’t be able to position yourself well and get organic traffic from search engines, which are essential for your business as they attract people actively looking for specific products or services right now. Whether or not you’ll end up in Google’s index depends on you.

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