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 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 webpages and index them. Actually Sitemap helps Google to find those page, which are hard to discover. So it’s better to have sitemap to help crawler.
How to Submit Sitemap to Google Webmaster
1. At first you have to create a 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 method. 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.