What a sitemap is, and why your builder probably has not made you one
A sitemap is a file listing every address on your site, so search engines can find pages instead of stumbling on them. It matters most when a site is new and nothing links to it yet. Check yours by visiting yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Search engines mostly discover pages by following links from pages they already know. A brand new site has no links pointing at it, so that route is closed. The sitemap is the other route, and on a young site it is doing nearly all the work.
What a good one looks like
- Every page you actually want found, and nothing you do not.
- Full addresses, including https:// and your domain.
- A last-modified date only where the date is real. Stamping today onto everything makes the field worthless, and search engines start ignoring it.
- Kept up to date automatically. A hand-maintained sitemap is out of date within a month.
Submitting it
Search Console has a Sitemaps section. Paste the address, submit once, and it will tell you how many addresses it read and how many it indexed. That gap, read versus indexed, is one of the most useful numbers you can watch.
A sitemap does not make pages rank. It makes them findable, which is the step before. If your pages are being read but not indexed, the problem is the pages rather than the list.