The online marketing team at Media Messages love everything and anything to do with search engine optimisation. And trust us, this practice certainly keeps you on your toes! Whilst our copywriters specialise in writing compelling telephone message on hold scripts, our voice artists bring those scripts to life and our audio engineers turn them into pieces of audio advertising art, our role is to ensure our website comes up high in the Google rankings.

And we’re going to share some of our wisdom with you. Sitemaps are an extremely important component to your website. Think of your sitemap like a directory for the search engines – but a far more advanced one. You are basically supplying the search engines with a roadmap of your website – a roadmap that can be updated as your website changes.

A sitemap is especially important for new websites, as you can help the search engines like Google find and index your pages. A sitemap allows the search engines to find you without the need for internal or external links pointing to that particular page (however, links are extremely important for getting your rankings higher).

Creating and Submitting a Sitemap

Basically, you need to generate a sitemap, upload it to your website and then let the search engines know about it.

There are a number of ways to generate a sitemap – you can use a plug-in (great for WordPress websites, use a free online sitemap generator or download and install a sitemap generator. Simply do a search on Google and there will be a number of solutions to suit your website. Once you have created your sitemap – it is best to add it to your website. The footer is quite a popular place to put the sitemap – this way your audience can also access it, and the sitemap will effectively help with the navigation of your website.

Once you have generated your sitemap, simply log-in to your Google Webmaster Tools – and under crawl you will see a link called ‘Sitemaps’. Click on this link and add your sitemap. It’s as simple as that!

This is just one technique that can help your website rank better on the search engines – which will hopefully result in more traffic, which means a bigger chance of conversion.

Good luck peoples.