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Setting up Google Search Console

How to submit Sitemaps?

Submit sitemaps to help search engines search about pages on your sites. SEO helps grow business and website traffic but sitemap makes site searchable on search engines and thus complement results. Sitemap is an XML file which stores links to all your pages, blogs, images and all contents of your website that are available for crawling. It is an easy way to help robots to crawl all listed web-pages and index them within search engine.

Google Search Console or Google Webmaster is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. It helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site. Submitting Sitemap is what makes your site and its content searchable on Google. Below are the point-wise steps on how to submit sitemaps in Google Webmaster or Search console.

    1. Open Google Webmaster or Search Console.
    2. Click on Sign in.
    3. Login to your Webmaster login.
    4. Go to Sitemap.
    5. Open a new tab and type in your domain name. Append
      1. “sitemap_index.xml”: if your site is made in wordpress and Yoast SEO is installed as a plugin. Yoast SEO helps create sitemap file for the site.
      2. “sitemap.xml”: if your site is made through an shopify site.
        For example:
        WordPress site: https://www.domainname.com/sitemap_index.xml
        Shopify site: https://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml”
    6. You will get a sitemap xml file displayed in your browser.
    7. Paste “sitemap_index.xml”  for  the wordpress site or “sitemap.xml” for the shopify site against the domainname in search console ( “Enter Sitemap URL”)
    8. Click on submit.
    9. Search console would show success in setting up of sitemap within few minutes.
What is Sitemap?

What is a Sitemap?

What is a Sitemap of the website?

A sitemap is a file providing information about the pages, videos and other files on your site and the relationships between them. It helps Google and other search engines crawl and map website. A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site.  

It also provides valuable information about the files, for example –

  • Information about the pages.
  • When the page was last updated.
  • How often the page is changed.
  • Alternate language versions of a page.

Sitemaps are mainly used to improve the index process of your website by search engines, they can be used to provide accessibility to certain pages as well. It does not affect the normal way crawler bots index your page – it just extends the visibility and accessibility of your content.

Search engines like Google always try to display the most relevant results  to people for any given search query. In order do this effectively, they use site crawlers to read, organize and index information on the Internet.

XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to read the content on your site and index the pages accordingly. As a result, this increases chances of improving the SEO ranking of the website.

Submitting a sitemap is very critical in SEO rank of your website. Click to know: How to submit sitemap for the website so that it be indexed by Google and other search engines in an intelligent manner.

Do remember to share your feedback in the comment section. Please refer to sitemaps.org for further updates.