If you are like many website owners, you've worked extremely hard on your SEO to make sure that your site ranks—and ranks well—in the search engines. Maybe you spent hundreds of man hours on SEO efforts or even hundreds of dollars on a professional SEO agency to provide you with exceptional results. With that said, when it comes time to redesign your website the last thing you want is for all of your hard work to be affected negatively.

Regardless of how old or new your website is, if you have inherited the site or you are ready to migrate your website from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, a website audit is imperative to the success of your website and business. A site audit will help you learn the ins and outs of your website, what content is on the site, how it’s structured and frankly, if the content you do have is working in your favor (i.e. doing what it’s supposed to; convert!).

Google’s adoption and official launch of sitemaps way back in 2005 is all web developers and software engineers needed to come up with simplified ways of creating, submitting and managing sitemaps. As a result, the web is currently filled with quite a few sitemap generators and things are not likely to slow down. You can now install plugins on your Wordpress blog that will handle everything related to sitemaps. It is actually a necessity for all website owners that cannot be ignored. A simple Google search will bring forth hundreds of results and as always, everyone claims to be the best unless you are suffering from some esteem issues.

Having a sitemap on your website is no longer a question of ‘if’ or ‘why’, but rather about ‘when.’ That is, there are many benefits that website owners get from this simple act that can even be automated with the help of a sitemap generator. It is not only good for your SEO, but also highly recommended for a better user experience in the long run. If you have just created a new website or included fresh pages, it is paramount that you ensure the pages are easily discoverable. You can make this happen by creating a sitemap, submitting it to the search engines of your choice (start with Google) and then updating it.