Trying to learn how to submit sitemap to Google? Submitting a sitemap is a necessity if you want to index your site by search engines and want organic traffic for free. People who create new sites and publish content for readers should care about this. Many webmasters publishing valued content enriched with insights and tutorials want to have traffic from Google. This is the case that most site owners expect to get traffic, increase sales, and leverage a new level of business strategy.
You need to create a sitemap and submit it to Google for faster crawling and indexing in order to get organic traffic. Once you have created a sitemap, you can submit it to search engines through their webmaster tools. Each search engine has its own way to crawl and index sites. Google sitemap submission is very easy and one of the most used services for sitemap submission.
Many newbies and readers don’t know how to submit sitemap to Google. I have provided this article to give insights on how to submit a sitemap to Google.
Page of Contents
- What Is a Sitemap?
- Types of Sitemaps
- How to Create a Sitemap?
- How to Submit Sitemap to Google?
Page Contents
What Is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that contains information on important pages, posts, categories, and other contents of your website and their relations among them. A sitemap tells Google which pages are more important and need to be crawled and indexed faster. In other words, it helps Google to read how the pages are linked to each other. On reading the sitemap, the search engine starts to crawl and index the pages so as to show the relevant pages in the search engine result pages(SERPs). You need to submit the sitemap to Google, once you have created it.
Types of Sitemap
Sitemaps are mainly of two types, namely, (1) the XML sitemap and (2) the HTML sitemap. Both kinds of sitemaps are important but there exists a difference in accessibility, crawling, and indexing.
XML Sitemap: XML Sitemap is made for search engines. Crawlers and search engine bots can access, crawl, read, and index such a sitemap. It contains important information including metadata on each URL found within the website. Googlebot can take feed from any change or update on any URL contained in the sitemap. on You can create an XML Sitemap with a sitemap generator. Also, you can do this SEO plugins like Rank Math, Yoast, etc. XML Sitemap plays a crucial role in SEO.
HTML Sitemap: HTML Sitemap is a page that contains all the subpages of a website. It is normally placed at the footer of a site. Readers can view such a sitemap. Clicking on the sitemap opens the subpages which can take you to a particular page provided that you click on the link specified for that page. HTML Sitemap is enabled for human readers, not for search engine crawlers and it does not get updated on auto-pilot. Now, we are not going to detail it, as the article is going to provide tutorials on how to submit a sitemap to Google. We shall cover it in another article.
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How to Create a Sitemap?
Your site has contained a lot of content that you want to submit to Google. You need a sitemap containing the important pages of your website. Now, you can create a sitemap using an SEO plugin like Rank Math. Rank Math can create a sitemap for your website. On the WordPress site, this is a great plugin to manage search engine optimization. For each CMS, there are tools to generate a sitemap. Install the plugin and activate it. If you don’t know how to install a plugin, then read our guide on how to install and set up a WordPress plugin.
Once you have installed and activated Rank Math, you need to set up it to let it work properly.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can create a sitemap by checking the sitemap enabling button under ‘Sitemaps’ from the Wizard setup. You can enable and disable the button for sitemap generation.
Upon the activation of the plugin, it creates an XML Sitemap by default.
Also, you can access your sitemap and manage it from the “Sitemap Setting” option under your dashboard. The sitemap settings contain several options to include and exclude sitemap files on posts, pages, and categories.
The sitemap URL may look like this: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml
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How to Submit Sitemap to Google?
Want to submit your sitemap to Google? If so, you can do this via Google Search Console(GSC). Sign in to your Google account if you have an existing account or you can create a new account and sign in.
So, go through the following steps to submit the sitemap to Google:
- Sign in to Google Search Console(GSC).
- Locate your site in the left vertical menus. You can see your site here if you have already completed site ownership verification. You need to verify site ownership if you have not done this before, as it is a must-have to use GSC.
- Scroll down along the scroll bar located at the right of the GSC menu bar.
- Locate the “Index” menu and open it to access the submenus.
- Locate the “Sitemaps” submenu under the Index menu.
- Click on “Sitemaps” and it takes you to the page specified for sitemap submission.
- Add the sitemap in the field specified for the sitemap URL.
- Once the sitemap URL is added therein, click on submit
Want to know how to submit sitemap to Google in more detail? Go through the following points and learn how to submit sitemap to Google. I have explained it step by step with screenshots.
So, let’s start.
Type Google Search Console on your browser and hit the Enter or search button. Once you have typed it and hit the search button, it will look like this. You can see the sign-in option for Search Console.
So, click sign in. Once you signed in to the search console, you can access your property. Under the GSC, click on the triangular icon inside the box labeled as ‘search property.
You can access your property if you have already finished your domain ownership verification, nonetheless, you have to verify your domain ownership.
You can’t submit a sitemap to Google until you verify domain ownership. I have assumed that you have verified your domain ownership. If it is so, you can access your property.
Click on your property and you can see the following menus:
- Overview
- Performance
- URL Inspection
- Index ⏩
- Coverage
- Sitemaps
- Removals
Click on “Index” and it will open the submenus. Locate the “Sitemaps” and click on it. It takes you to the sitemaps page where you can add your website’s sitemaps’ URL and submit.
Add your sitemap in the field labeled as “Add a new sitemap”. Once the sitemap’s URL is added therein, click “Submit”
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