Most bloggers are always looking for ways to keep bringing more traffic to their blogs. Most of us try to be very active on social media and keep sharing and promoting our blog posts on places like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest to give them more exposure. But today we’re going to look at another strategy to help bring in more traffic and that’s through the search engines. When people are searching and typing queries into a search engine, we certainly want that search engine (Google for instance) to be able to find us when it’s returning search results. We can help the search engines along on this by submitting an XML sitemap to them for our blog.
Here’s a brief excerpt from that article with an explanation of a sitemap:
“An XML sitemap is a way for website owners to tell search engines about all the pages that exist on their website. . . . While sitemaps do not boost your search rankings, it allows search engines to better crawl your website.”
And’s that’s why we’re going to take a moment out of our busy blogging schedules to think about sitemaps. We want to help those search engine bots as they’re crawling around the web in search of new info, and we want to get our pages indexed in case they aren’t indexed yet.
How I Submitted My Sitemaps to Google
Submitting my sitemaps is something I’m finally working on and I’m a little frustrated with myself that it’s taken me this long {but better late than never!} I’m getting started by submitting my sitemaps for both my blogs to Google and from there plan to work on submitting to Yahoo and Bing.
I’ll share here what I did to submit an XML sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools. These steps are for a self hosted WordPress blog.
This tutorial will give instructions using the Yoast SEO Plugin and Google Webmaster Tools.
Check Out Yoast Settings Tutorial General Settings of Yoast wordpress seo plugin after installation
- If you are not already using the Yoast SEO plugin you will need to install and activate it.
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Next on your WordPress menu bar on the left side of your screen, hover over “SEO” and then click “XML Sitemaps”.
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Check the box where it says “Click this box to enable XML Sitemap functionality”.
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Underneath that it will say “You can find your XML Sitemap here” with a box next to it that you will click on.
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That will bring you to your XML Sitemap and you will probably see several URL’s listed (I had 5)
NOW . . . on to the second part of the process . . .
- Go to your Google Webmaster Tools. You will need a Google account to access these tools. If you’ve never been to the Webmaster Tools, the quickest way to get there is to just Google “Webmaster Tools” and good ole Google will bring you right where you need to be.
If your site is not yet listed in the Webmaster Tools you will need to click on “Add a Site” and enter your site’s URL.
You will then need to verify your site which you can do by clicking on “Manage Site” and then “Verify Site”
Click on “Alternate Methods” and then select “HTML Tag”. Copy the meta tag that then appears.
How To Submit Website Into Google Webmaster Tools Complete Tutorial
THEN . . . back we go to the Yoast plugin . . .
- Once again, in your WordPress menu bar on the left hand side, hover over “SEO” and then select “Dashboard”.
Scroll down to the Webmaster Tools area and copy your meta tag into the field provided where it says “Google Webmaster Tools” and then click “Save Changes”.
And now back to the Webmaster Tools . . .
- Once your site is verified, you can click on your blog name in the Webmaster tools and it will bring you to a page where on the right hand side you will see “Sitemaps”. If there is not a sitemap yet it will show “No Sitemaps”. Clicking on that area will bring you to a page where you will see a red box that says “Add/Test Sitemap” which you will click on.
This will bring up a little box where you can paste in the ending part of the sitemap URL. You will need to go back to the screen we talked about in step 5, copy the ending portion of each of the URL’s and submit each of them one by one. When you are done you will see how many sitemaps it shows are now submitted (and because you did it all by yourself it will tell you it was done “By me”. Good for us!
And that should do it!
You’ve taken care of one more important task that can help your blog grow. We’ll be looking at how to submit sitemaps to Yahoo and Bing too in upcoming posts.
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