Arriving at this post I believe you know the importance of a sitemap. I am going to show you how to submit your blog sitemap to Google for quick indexing of your posts.
First things first, let’s understand what a sitemap is before we proceed further.
A sitemap is an XML file that contains the URLs of all pages, posts, and sometimes media of your blog.
It is the sitemap that will helps crawlers easily locate individual URLs of your blog pages and posts.
The sitemap also helps webpages to be indexed within a short period of time.
Generating a sitemap for your site is no big deal. For an ordinary website, there are lots of online sitemap generators to enable you to generate a sitemap easily, such as “XML-sitemaps.com“.
While for WordPress sites and blogs, there are lots of free and paid plugins which can be used to auto-generate sitemap.
Top free SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO Plugin and All In One SEO Plugin can be used to generate sitemaps for your WordPress site.
Just having a sitemap is not the solution for a perfect SEO practice, not until the sitemap had been submitted to the search engine.
In this post, we shall learn how to submit our sitemap to Google, in other to ensure quick indexing of our blog post as well as building our blog SEO.
How to Submit Blog Sitemap to Google
1. Verify your blog or website on Google Console
If your blog is verified move to the next step, else follow this link How To Verify Your Blog On Google Webmaster to verify your blog.
2. Go to www.google.com/webmasters and click on “Start now”
3. Click on the URL of the site you want to submit the sitemap
Each site is identified as property on the search console. If you have added multiple properties on your Google console, you will have to select the property you want to work with.
4. Your Google console dashboard homepage should look like the image below
5. Click on the Sitemaps on the left bar menu
Just as shown on the arrow “1” on the image below click on “Sitemaps” to open the sitemap page.
On arrow “2” enter your sitemap URL, without the domain name (remember your domain name has already been verified by the console, so you don’t need to enter it) and click on Submit.
Do note that you can add multiple sitemaps by repeating the same process.
On the arrow “3” You will see the status of each of the site map you have added. Make sure each of the sitemap status displays success, as shown on the arrow.
If any of the status displays an error, crosscheck the sitemap URL. For as long as a sitemap has been created and the URL is correctly entered it will you will get success confirmation.
After submitting your sitemap your status will be pending for some hours.
The extension of every sitemap must be “.xml”, and you must enter the extension on the link.
Just as shown in the image above, once your sitemap has been received by Google, you will be able to see the number of URLs discovered and how many were indexed.
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