You must Create XML sitemap for your website. And it is must to submit a sitemap to all search engines. That will help search engines to crawl your website. XML sitemap will greatly improve your website SEO. This tutorial will give you information about creating XML sitemap on a WordPress website and submitting the XML sitemap to search engines.
- Related: What is SEO(Search Engine Optimization)?
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What is XML sitemap?
A sitemap is just a list of all pages on your website. The XML sitemap is a format which is understandable to search engines about your website posts and pages. XML sitemap will greatly help search engines to crawl your website efficiently.
Whenever you publish a new post on your website, your sitemap will automatically get updated so that search engines will know about the new post and updated posts.
This sitemap will inform search engines about how frequently you are updating your website.
XML sitemap may not improve your post rankings but they will help search engines to crawl your existing posts and new posts.
Whenever you see the drop in your website traffic, you must first check your sitemap whether it is working properly.
How to Create XML sitemap
Video Tutorial:
For our reader’s convenience, we always create a video tutorial. Here we have created a video on how to create an XML site map. You can watch it to learn. Or you can skip it if you want to read.
It is not recommended to generate a sitemap manually. You can use Yoast SEO or jetpack plugins to create an XML sitemap. But it is best to use the Yoast plugin to generate a sitemap Because you can have more control over your sitemap with the Yoast plugin. Whenever you update your posts or website, the Yoast SEO plugin will automatically update the sitemap so that search engines will always have the latest information. Automatic updation is not possible with the manual sitemaps. So use it is best to use the plugin.
Go to your WordPress dashboard. Install and activate Yoast SEO plugin if you did not have.
Go to SEO -> General -> Features from the left menu.
Make sure the XML Sitemap functionality is enabled. After that Click on the save changes button.
- Read: 12 best on-page SEO techniques to get No.1 rank in Google
- What are follow and nofollow links in SEO? Do nofollow links help SEO
How to submit sitemap to Google
Before submitting the sitemap, make sure you had submitted your website to Google webmaster tools and verified.
Your Sitemap URL might be like https://dealvwant.com/sitemap_index.xml. Copy the slug of your sitemap URL which is the trailing part of URL sitemap_index.xml
Open Google webmaster tools. Login with your Email. You will see your websites.
Click on the site for which you need to submit the sitemap.
Go to Index-> Sitemaps. Paste only the slug of the sitemap URL. You can use Test button to test the error of your sitemap. Just click Submit.
You will see the success message. Refresh the page.
You will see the status as pending. It will take some time to verify your sitemap.
You can repeat the same procedure for your non-www, https, non-www https versions also.
Bing webmaster tools ask you to submit the sitemap while adding the site itself.
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I hope this tutorial helped you to Create XML sitemap and submit to Google. If you like this article, please share it with your friends. If you want more blogging tips, follow BlogVwant on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.