Creating a sitemap for your WordPress website should only take a few minutes. While many options for creating a sitemap exist in WordPress, we use Yoast SEO to create this since it is a built in feature that we already use on sites we build or market. In order to configure your XML sitemap with the Yoast plugin, you need to complete a few short steps.
In order to view what your website looks like, type the string /sitemap.xml after your domain. For example, you can view our sitemap here. Now that you have finished creating this directory, search engines like Google can digest the content and structure of your website better. Simply waiting for search engines to crawl and read your site can be painstakingly slow however and there is an easier way to get this newly created map into search engine databases.
Since Google is the most successful search engine in the world, you will definitely want to submit your website here.
Submitting to other search engines helps with your visibility all over the internet. Many people use Bing simply because it’s the default search engine on their computer.
Yandex is a search engine founded in Russia and accounts for a market share of over 50% in search traffic occurring in Russia. This means that there is both plenty of web traffic as well as crawlers here to bolster your websites relevance on an international scale.
Baidu is the 4th largest website on the internet as measured by Alexa rankings. While this is the second largest search engine in the world, since it has a 78% market share in Chinese search engine use it is largely ignored by the western world and should not be dismissed so lightly. We have found that submitting a site-map to Baidu significantly helps in overall indexing and thus ranking of a website.
Listing your sitemap within your robots.txt file is another way to make certain that search engines that do not accept a submission quickly locate and index your website. While these are the only four websites we know of to submit yourself to today, this is a process that often changes over the years and you should always submit them to as many places as possible. More indexing equals more traffic!