One way that people find your academic website is to use a search engine. They do a search with your name or your research topic, and your website appears as one of the search results. Of course, this depends on how well your website ranks among other websites. 

There are many ways to improve the rank of your website. One way is to create a sitemap. A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the relevant pages on your website. Search engines use your sitemap file to intelligently crawl your pages.

Creating a sitemap 

You have several options to create a sitemap depending on how you created your website. 

If you have an Owlstown website, your sitemap is automatically generated. To view the sitemap of your Owlstown website, visit <your-subdomain>.owlstown.com/sitemap.xml or <your-domain-name>/sitemap.xml

If you made a website with a different website builder, check if your sitemap is automatically generated. 

If you created your website from scratch, you have two options. 

1. You can write the sitemap by hand. Here’s the description of the format from Sitemaps.org.
2. Use a service that will crawl your site and automatically generate a sitemap. A free one is XML-Sitemaps.

Further readings

• Google's Learn about Sitemaps
• What Are the SEO Benefits of XML & HTML Sitemaps?

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