Brace yourself, I’m going to tell you something unfathomable: Google doesn’t know everything.

Well, ok, maybe they DO know everything, but they don’t know everything right away. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you need a sitemap.

What’s a sitemap?

A sitemap is basically a map of your website that is readable by search engines. If you think about it, the menu on your website that shows what all your pages are about is map of sorts for your site’s visitors. A sitemap is similar, but it’s made specifically for search engines to read and understand what’s on your website.

Why is a sitemap important?

Primarily, a sitemap is important because it tells a search engine what pages are on your website, especially if all your pages don’t link to each other in some way (which, by the way, they should.) But having the sitemap itself isn’t enough. The sitemap 1) must be formatted for a search engine to read, and 2) must be submitted to the search engine for indexing.

Google is a monster of a search engine. It often seems all knowing. But you know what? It will take Google quite awhile to find your website and index it — basically, check out all the pages, figure out what it’s about and decide where it should show up in search results — if you don’t tell it that you exist. Submitting a sitemap is the way to do that. Otherwise, it could take Google six months to a year to find your site.

There are many ways to create a sitemap. The ways to do so vary greatly based on what platform you’re using for your website. With WordPress, for example, you can use the yoast SEO plugin (which I have mentioned before) to create your sitemap for you. You can also have your sitemap created for free (just do a google search for sitemap generator and you’ll get a lot of free options; I like this one), then you upload it to your site. Your sitemap address on your site should be something like this: http://yourdreammaker.com/sitemap_index.xml

For both Google and Bing/Yahoo!, you sign up for their webmaster accounts  to submit your sitemap once you’ve put it on your site. (Here’s Google’s Webmaster account sign in/sign up; here’s Bing’s.) You will need a gmail account (or have your email hosted by Google) to create a Google webmaster account, and you’ll need an outlook, msn or hotmail account to create a webmaster account. You’ll enter your website address and the sitemap for the site. Both of these services require a verification process that shows you’re the owner of the site. If you’ve already set up Google analytics and verified your site for that process, you can link your analytics and webmaster accounts; when you do this, it will automatically verify the site.

One of the best advantages about submitting your website to either of these search engines is that they will then give you suggestions in your webmaster account on how to better improve your website so you show up higher in search results. That, AND they’ll tell you how often you’re showing up in search results, and for which keywords. All of this is valuable, free information, PLUS the added advantage of having told the search engines that you exist.