Welcome to this week’s edition of “Little Things”, a weekly blog series covering the small changes that you can make to improve marketing performance.

Last week’s topic was create a mobile website.

This week’s tip:

Create a Sitemap

Several of the tips in our Little Things series have focused on SEO. But however many it was, it was not enough. SEO should be a top priority for you, because it’s an easy way to get yourself ahead of the game, ranking near the top of search engines, and driving more traffic to your website. Most people who visit your site for the first time will start with a search on Google, and when they do, you want to show up above your competitors.

There are many strategies in the SEO realm, but today’s focus is on creating a sitemap. A sitemap can be used for two things.

First, you can submit a sitemap to search engines by creating a file on your server that tells the search engine what pages can be found on your site. It makes navigation easier, and will likely get more pages on your site noticed.

Second, a sitemap can be created as a new page on your site that lists and links to all other pages. Again, this is helpful for search engines because it boosts the number of internal links you have on your site, always a good thing. But this also is a helpful tool for new visitors who may get lost or may not be able to find what they are looking for in search.

So how do you do it?

1. There are several tools out there that can create a sitemap for you, such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
   
   
2. If you have a good idea what the pages on your site are, or if the site is small enough, you can create a sitemap page yourself by listing all the pages, arranging them in some hierarchy, and adding the link to each page alongside. This way your developer can go in and add this page to your site.