If you’ve just started your blogging career, you might not know how search engines work and how to display your website in the Google search results to drive traffic to your blog.
You can show your website in Google search for free if you can help Google to find your blog.
To do that, you should know about Google Search Console (earlier known as Google Webmaster Tools).
Search Console is a free tool offered by Google which helps you to display your website in Google search results (index or crawl your website).
This tool also helps you to improve the crawling rate of your blog.
All you have to do are a few simple things.
First of all, you’ve to verify in Google Search Console that you’re the owner of the website.
And, the second and most important task is to submit your blog/website sitemap to search console.
Here, I’m going to guide you through step by step methods about how to submit website sitemap to Google webmaster tools.
But, before that we need to understand what actually a sitemap is, and why is it important for your blog to submit a sitemap.
For verifying your website ownership on Search Console, you can refer to this article on Kissmetrics blog.
So, without much further ado, let’s get started.
What is a Sitemap?
As the word sounds, a sitemap is actually a map of your website.
When Google crawlers go around the web indexing new web pages in its database, new blogs are usually missed out as only a few or no sites are linking to them as well as they’re not aware of sitemap thing.
A sitemap is either an XML or HTML file that contains all the URLs of the pages inside your blog.
While HTML sitemap helps your visitors to navigate through your blog, an XML sitemap helps the search engine crawlers the same way.
When you submit an XML sitemap to Google Webmasters, it helps search engine crawlers to find all the URLs on your website and add it to their database.
There are various parts of a sitemap that affect the crawling rate of your blog, such as the size of your sitemap, the number of URLs in your sitemap, indexing priority of pages on your blog, updating frequency, etc.
Now, that you know about sitemap and its importance, let’s move on to the further steps.
Step 1: Sign in to your Google Webmasters Account.
Step 2: Select the desired blog you wish to submit the sitemap for.
Step 3: At the left side of the page, click on Sitemaps under Crawl section.
Step 4: Now, at the top-right corner of the page, click on Add/Test Sitemap button.
Step 5: Add the below code in the provided text field.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
This is the sitemap code for your blogger blog that you need to add.
Step 6: Press “Submit Sitemap” button.
Step 7: Refresh the page.
Congratulation! You have finished the process of submitting your blog sitemap.
Note: The above sitemap will work for 500 posts only. If you have more than 500 posts published on your blog, then you have to add one more sitemap.
The Whole procedure will be same, but at this time you have to add this code.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=1000
That's it. You are done with submitting the sitemap for blog posts. Now let's move to the 2nd part i.e submitting a sitemap for blogspot static pages.
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