Whenever you create a blog or website, the first thing you want is ‘people find your site’. People can easily find your site through Google. But Google won’t index your site instantly. You have to wait until Google bot crawls your site.
So our task is to enforce Google bot to crawl your site. The very first step to let Google Bot know about your site is submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. In this post, I will show how to do that. Before we move to the tutorial, let’s get some idea about sitemap.
What is a sitemap?
A Sitemap is an XML file that contains URLs inside your blog. This helps search engine to crawl your web pages and index them. Actually, Sitemap helps Google to find those page, which is hard to discover. So it’s better to have a sitemap to help crawler.
How to Submit Sitemap to Google Webmaster
1. At first, you have to create an xml sitemap for your site. If you are using WordPress Blog then you can easily make a sitemap file by using Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
2. Once you’ve created your sitemap, Go to Google Webmaster Tools and sign in with your Gmail account. Click ‘Add a site’ and type your site link.
3. Then they will ask you to verify your ownership. They offer several methods. Their recommended method is HTML file upload. Alternative methods are HTML tag, Google Analytics and Domain name provider.
So there are several ways to verify your ownership. I recommend you to use “Adding a meta tag to your site’s home page”
Just select select HTML tag, Copy the given meta tag, and paste it into your site’s home page. For WordPress user add this code to your Head section in theme editor.
Once you’ve added the meta code on your site, Click on Verify button. It will show a verification message that your site is successfully verified.
4. Now time to submit your sitemap. Click on ”Sitemaps’ under ‘Optimization’. A new page will be appeared. Click on ‘ADD/TEST SITEMAP’ button from top right. A box will be shown.
Now submit your sitemap URL. If you use the ‘Google XML Sitemaps’ plugin then it will be sitemap.xml. Put it on that box. Click on ‘Submit Sitemap’ button.
Once you’ve submitted your sitemap it will be shown a message that ”Sitemap’ submitted.
That’s it. You are done. Your site will be indexed soon.
- Submit your Site on Technorati
- Submit your Site on Bing
Hope this post helps you to submit your sitemap on Google. Do let us know if you face any difficulty. Do you have any strategy for quick indexing by Google?
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Interesting and informative article. I am looking for such an article that help me to submit my site on google webmaster tools. I have done. Thanks a lot for sharing such an excellent article.
Glad I could help. Let me know if you need any other help.
Thanks the best explanation ever. So simple.Already submitted mine.everything is going ok
Thanks for the kind words.
Thank you sooo much. I was really struggling, but I followed your steps and figured it out. Great useful post for a new blogger like me!
Glad you found it useful :)
This really works, and thats the same method I used when creating my tech blog in GHANA named ictlabgh.blogspot.com and within some days, I started seeing some organic traffic even without working on other S.E.O.
Thank you for this tutorial.
Glad I could help.
Hello Istiak,
Thank you very much for this great step-by-step article for submitting sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools. It will definitely help more newbie like me. Keep it up!
good article.. but i want to ask you what sitemap must submited on webmaster? ex sitemap.xml , feed, what more?
Only sitemap.xml to Google Webmaster tools.
Very nice information Bro. Is it needed just once to submit site map or we have to update it?
Qaiser, you don’t have to update it later. It will be updated automatically.
I like this post bro. You are realy the big guy in the nich nice work there.
Yes, Google Sitemap is really vary important part for all blog. Your article is really including a valuable information .
Thank you so much for this article.
This is a must thing all bloggers need to know.
Yeah, agree with you.
This is really cool. I’m simply going to that.
Submitting sitemap to Google Webmaster tool is important though many people go opposed to it. But I believe somehow it helps and the HTML, Malware and keyword suggestion inside GWT really helps.