You’ve poured your heart and soul into creating a new website. The design is perfect. The content flows beautifully. The graphics are stunning. Now you’ve got to get people there.
One of the simplest, and often overlooked, steps of SEO is submitting your XML sitemap to the search engines. Although the search engine bots will eventually find your site anyway, submitting an XML sitemap can help speed up the crawling and indexing processes for your website and help to improve its ability to rank well in search results.
Steps to Submit the XML Sitemap to Google
- Visit your website and make note of the URL of your XML sitemap. For example, com/sitemap.xml.
- Create a Google Search Console account and verify that you own the website.
- Once verified and logged into your Google Search Console account, go to Crawl, then Sitemaps.
- Click the red “Add/Text Sitemap” button then add the subfolder portion of the URL to the box. For example, sitemap.xml.
- Click “Submit” – and you’re done! Refresh your browser to see the sitemap is now listed. You will also be able to see if there are any errors with the sitemap you submitted.
