After creating a blog or website, submitting a Sitemap in Google Search Console is most important. It helps Google to crawl and index your blog better and quickly.
In this article, I will tell you how to submit sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
What is Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool developed by Google. You can use it to track your website’s performance (how your site is performing in Google). You can get valuable information about your website such as crawl errors, ranking keywords, impressions and more from your Google Search Console account.
Furthermore, Google Search Console will notify you if there are any Errors in your site.
Why Submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
When it comes to improving your ranking, XML Sitemaps can help you greatly. This helps Google and other main search engines (Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com) better crawl your website and understand your website structure easily.
In addition, if your site is very large, you’ll need a sitemap.
But before submitting a sitemap in Google Search Console, we will know what is a sitemap.
What is Sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file that contains the URL of your blog that tells search engines about all the pages that are present on their website.
A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site and also provides valuable information about these files – When the page was last updated, how often the page is changed.
Now let’s submit sitemap to Google Search Console…
Create Your Sitemap
There are so many online tools to create an XML sitemap. Here I have mentioned 4 ways – How to Create XML Sitemap for WordPress.
But WordPress user, we can use the Yoast SEO plugin to create Sitemap. After publishing a new post, it will automatically update your sitemap and you will not need to update your sitemap manually again and again.
Create Sitemap Using Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast is a very popular WordPress SEO plugin that provides tons of features (content analysis, meta keywords and description, XML sitemaps, social features, rich snippets, and much more).
If you are already using the Yoast plugin, you can easily create an XML Sitemap with its help.
First, navigate to General >> Features >> XML Sitemaps >> ?. You can see in the screenshot below.
This will redirect you to the XML Sitemap page. As you can see in the screenshot.
Copy the URL from the address bar of your browser. This will be your Sitemap and will look like this,
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
By the way, There are so many online tools to create an XML sitemap.
Submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
To Submit sitemap to Google Search Console, log in to your Google Search Console account. In the left column, click on the ‘Sitemaps’ option, then paste the last part of the URL (sitemap_index.xml) and click on the Submit button. Here is a complete guide – How to Use Google Search Console to Effectively Grow Your Website Traffic
It may take some time to show the index status.
You’ve successfully added your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
If you are running a site that has a lot of images and videos, you can also create an image sitemap and video sitemap.
We’re done, and it’s now your turn! Find this article helpful? Don’t forget to share!
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