Submitting A Sitemap To Google: Learn How To Do It Easily
What Is A Sitemap
In this blog post, we’ll be learning about creating a sitemap for your website and submitting a sitemap to google.
A sitemap is a file where you list the pages, videos, and other files on your site and show the relationships between them. It is basically a list of pages of a website with a domain.
Just like a city or a town has a roadmap telling about its various routes and destinations, a sitemap is like a roadmap of your website telling about its various pages and posts and the relationship between them.
Importance Of A sitemap
A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. It helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website’s content. sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important.
XML sitemaps are the most used type of sitemaps. An “XML Sitemap” is a file that contains a list of all the important pages of a website.
The reason for having all of them stored in one file “XML Sitemap” is that it helps crawlers to find all the pages in one place, instead of discovering them via internal links.
An XML sitemap is also important for SEO because it tells search engine bots which pages on your site are important and should be crawled.
Without a sitemap, important pages on your site may be left out during the crawling process, which could hurt your ranking.
Disclosure: Some links in this article are my affiliate links. If you buy any product through any of these links, I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Such a commission helps me to stay motivated and produce more such content.
How To Generate A Sitemap
Here, I am assuming that you use WordPress for your website. So, I’ll be focusing on how to create a sitemap on a WordPress site.
Creating A Sitemap In WordPress
In WordPress, installing a plugin called Yoast SEO will do most of the work. Yoast SEO generates a sitemap for your website automatically.
Here are some simple steps to get your sitemap through the Yoast SEO plugin:
- Install the Yoast SEO plugin and activate it on your WordPress site. (I’m assuming you know how to install a new plugin to WordPress, so we’ll skip this step)
- After installing the Yoast SEO plugin, click on Yoast SEO and then click on the General tab.
3. Then click on the Features tab
4. After that, scroll down and look for XML sitemaps. Make sure it is set to On. Click on the question mark (?) next to XML sitemaps and then click on See The XML Sitemap as shown in the image below.
5. After clicking on ‘See the XML Sitemap’, a webpage will open as shown in the image below. Whatever you see on the screen is your sitemap. Now, Copy the URL from the address bar of this page.
That’s it. We have our sitemap URL now.
The next thing we are looking for is submitting this sitemap to google.
How to Submit A Sitemap To Google
Submitting a sitemap to Google is necessary as it helps Google to crawl or visit our website and get to know the structure and different pages and sections therein.
Here are some simple steps for submitting your sitemap on Google:
- Go to Google Search Console. Once you visit it, click on Start Now.
NOTE: I’m assuming you know how to create an account on Google Search Console. If you need help with that, you can find a lot of videos on youtube for the same.
2. Make sure your website is selected in the top left corner. Then, click on the Sitemaps tab.
3. Under ‘Add A New Sitemap URL’, paste your previously copied sitemap URL and click on Submit.
4. After submitting, you will see a success message and will see a table showing all the submitted URLs and their status.
NOTE: Sometimes, you may get the status of your submission as “Couldn’t Fetch”. But, don’t worry. It is just a bug from google’s end. Check the status after a couple of hours or a day, you will see the success status.
Now, Google will be able to crawl your site effectively and index your site as soon as possible.
This is all you need to know about generating and submitting a sitemap to google. For any queries, comment in the comment section below.
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Further Reads:
How To Start A Blog For Free And Make Money From It In 2022
How To Get Traffic From Quora To Your Website/Blog In 2022
Ali is a passionate and experienced blogger with a mission to teach others how to start their own blog, monetize it, and become successful in the process. He shares the lessons he’s learned on his own journey through personal anecdotes and factual examples.
