One of the best ways to get Google to crawl your new website is to submit your sitemap. Submitting your sitemap to Google helps improve your search engine traffic because it improves your index rate.
Today’s post will guide you in the step-by-step process of submitting your sitemap to Google and will provide you with some helpful tips in making your sitemap.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a web page that contains all the links to other pages of your website. Usually in XML format, sitemaps are created to help Google better crawl pages of your website. In return, the number of pages from your website indexed by Google increase resulting in an increased website traffic.
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
- Your site has dynamic content. (i.e. weblogs)
- Your site has pages that are not easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawling process.
- Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for Google to discover it.)
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
Creating Your Sitemap
Luckily, creating your sitemap has become an easy task and even non-techie bloggers can make one for themselves. This is particularly true if you are using Wordpress and Blogger as your blogging platform.
Wordpress
For Wordpress users, there are several Wordpress plugins that can help you easily generate an XML-sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog. Here are the best Wordpress plugins you can use to create your sitemap.
- Google XML Sitemap Generator - Arne Brachhold
- Sitemap Generator WP Plugin - Dagon Design
- Wordpress Simple Sitemap - Jens Tornell
Detailed instructions for using these Wordpress plugins can be found in their download page.
Blogger
Blogger users on the other hand can simply use the built in XML file of their blogs. All you need to do is simply add atom.xml at the end of your blog’s URL and this could already serve as your sitemap.
Submitting Your Sitemap To Google
Submitting your sitemap to Google is easy when you have your sitemap ready. First, you need to log-in to Google Webmasters. If you have an email with Gmail, you can use the same information to log-in. Otherwise, you need to create a Google account. It’s for free so there’s nothing to worry.
Once you’re inside your Google Webmaster account, the first thing you need to do is add your blog’s URL. Make sure that you submit your domain name NOT YOUR SITEMAP. Here’s an example.
Click on “Add Site” to submit your site.
After you’ve added your website, the next thing you need to do is verify that the website you submitted is really yours. Click on “Verify Your Site”.
You will then be directed to a page where you will choose how to verify your website. Click on the drop down menu and choose add meta tag. Adding a meta tag is the easier way to verify ownership of your website.
After choosing to add a meta tag, you will be given a code that you need to copy and paste in your site’s home page in the first <head> section of the page, before the first <body> section.
Once you’re done adding the meta tag, click on “Verify”. You should now be able to add your site’s sitemap. Visit your dashboard, then click on the Add link just below sitemap.
You will be directed to a drop down menu where you will choose the type of sitemap that you wish to submit. Choose “Add General Web Sitemap” from the drop down menu.
For the final step, you simply need to add sitemap. If you’ve used Google XML Sitemap by Arne, just add sitemap.xml or simply add atom.xml if you are using Blogger. Click on “Add General Web Sitemap” to finalize your submission.
Now all you have to do is wait for Google to visit and crawl your website.
If you have any thing you want me to write about, please feel free to use my contact form. I’ll try to cover them in my future post or I’ll just send you a detailed instruction.
Thank you for your time. Your comments are always welcome. 
