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Sitemaps are an easy way to inform Google about the content of your website and the structure of your pages, and it’s something that all websites should have in place on their site. What many people don’t realize, however, is that you need to create two different types of sitemaps: one type of sitemap will be submitted to Google as part of your XML sitemap; while the other type of sitemap will be submitted to Bing (and possibly other search engines) as part of your HTML sitemap.
To make your site discoverable in Google search engine you need to generate a XML file and submit it to Google search console.
This topic we will complete in two steps.
- Generate XML file
- Submit it to search console
Generating XLM file
1. go to your website dashboard.
2. From left hand side select plug ins
3. Click ad new plug in.
4. Search for ‘jetpack‘. Install and activate jetpack. Refresh the page and Then jetpack should be added to your dashboard.
5. From left menu select jetpack and click on settings.
6. From the top menu select ‘traffic’
7. Scroll down until you find an option for ‘generate XML sitemaps. Turn it on and jetpack will generate a XML file. Copy the link and this part of the process is complete.
Submit XML to seach console
1. Sign in to your Google search console account.
2. Click on Sitemap from the left sidebar.
3. On ‘add a new sitemap’ bar paste the XML file you copied and then click submit. The status will show ‘couldn’t fetch‘ for some time. Do not worry. Google takes some time to accept the sitemap submitted.
Building and submitting your sitemap will allow you to submit it, review it, change it at any time. You can also verify ownership of your site or sites. Having your sitemap verified is critical for search engines so that they can see that all pages are being crawled by bots, or spiders. If anything is amiss with your site, such as broken links or internal errors, search engines won’t be able to find those URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). Also worth mentioning is that there are other tools in Google Webmaster Tools including one for Data Highlighter where you can highlight certain data values of interest on each page that might otherwise go unseen by search engines. Think about keywords here!
Watch this YouTube video to learn more
I hope you find this article helpful. If you have any questions. Do not hesitate to leave a comment.
