When building a new website, you want it to be eye catching and helpful to visitors. But something that can get lost while minding your new page’s aesthetics is how the website looks to Google.
A Sitemap, in simple terms, is a list of the pages on your website. Why is it important? We’ll let Google explain:
“Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.”
Your page’s Sitemap gives it a clearer navigation and outline, which Google is happy to reward by boosting the search rank of your page. Google’s search algorithm is as secret as the KFC recipe, but here’s the truth: If you take two identical web pages and give one a Sitemap, that page will have a better Google rank than the page without the Sitemap.
If you have dynamic content on your page within a content management system, a Sitemap is absolutely essential.