Whenever you start a blog/site, one of the initial things to do is submitting your sitemap to Google. And it does make sense as Google is the most popular search engine.
But Google is not the only one. There are other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, etc. Bing is the second largest search engine in the USA which has around 24% search engine market share.
So there is no reason to underestimate Bing. Like Google Search Console. Bing has Bing Webmaster Tools that allows users to submit their sitemaps.
Here I’ll be sharing how to submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. If you don’t know what is a sitemap, here’s the answer.
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What Is A Sitemap?
A Sitemap is basically an XML file that contains the URLs of a website/blog. This file helps search engine bots like Bingbot to crawl your URLs and index them. It’s an excellent way to tell search engines that you’ve updated your blog as your sitemap gets updated when you publish a new post.
To see an example, you can check our sitemap here.
How To Create A Sitemap In WordPress
Creating a sitemap in WordPress is easy. There are several WordPress Plugins that can help you to create a sitemap. I use and recommend Yoast SEO.
Yoast SEO makes sitemap generation insanely easier. All you have to do is, install & activate the plugin. And a sitemap will be generated automatically.
Here’s how to install the plugin. Just go to WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Add New and search “Yoast SEO”. Click on the ‘Install Now’ button for the for the first result.
And then activate the plugin.
Once you’ve activated Yoast SEO Plugin, you are done.
Just go to http://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml and you will see your sitemap which will be something like this –
Before going to the submission part, let’s know a bit more about Bing Webmaster Tools.
What Is Bing Webmaster Tools?
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service by Microsoft that allows webmasters to add their site on Bing. It also allows you to check your site activities in Bing like clicks from search, appeared in search, pages crawled, crawl errors, page indexed, etc.
How To Submit Sitemap To Bing Webmaster Tools
Like submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console, it’s easy to submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools.
Once you’ve generated the sitemap, just follow these 3 simple steps.
Step 1: Sign In Bing Webmaster Tools
At first, go to Bing Webmaster Tools and click on “Sign In” button.
A form will be popped up that will ask you to sign in with your Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. In my case, I am going to use my Google account.
Step 2: Add Your Site & Sitemap
Once you are signed in, you will see a URL submission box. Just enter your site URL and click on “ADD”.
On the next page, it will ask you to submit your sitemap.
If you’ve created your sitemap with Yoast SEO, it will be like https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml
Now enter your sitemap URL and click on “ADD”.
Step 3: Verify Your Ownership
The last step is to verify the ownership of your blog. Bing offers 3 options to verify your ownership.
Option 1: Place an XML file on your web server.
Option 2: Copy and paste a <meta> tag in your default webpage.
Option 3: Add CNAME record to DNS.
Option 3 is the easiest one. You can do it by using the Yoast SEO Plugin. Just copy this code –
Then go to WordPress Dashboard > SEO > Dashboard and click on ‘Webmaster tools’ tab. And enter the code in Bing Webmaster Tools box and click on ‘Save Changes’.
Then Go back to ‘Bing Webmaster Tools’ and click on ‘VERIFY’.
That’s it. You are done. Bing will start indexing your URLs.
Conclusion
Hope this post helped you to submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools.
If you’ve faced any difficulties, feel free to share with us via comment. I’ll try my best to solve the issue.
And if you’ve found this post useful, help me by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.
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