Once we have created a blog successfully, one of the most common issues we come across is that we now have to submit and list our blog to search engines. To many people, this is a major problem.
Many new bloggers think that they have to pay the search engines to get their blogs listed in their consoles. That is not at all true.
Search engines list your site in their consoles for free and show your site up in search results according to the quality of content and material you provide. So the only thing that you need to learn is how to let Google find your content.
For this, we first have to understand what a sitemap is and how you have to submit your sitemap to a search engine.
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What is a sitemap?
Defined by wikipedia, a site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users.
It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design, or a Web page that lists the pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
Basically, a sitemap is a url that contains the list of all the links and pages on that particular website. These XML sitemaps help the search engines see which pages you have on your site and not just that. It also lets the search engines see which links on your website are more important than the others and how often you update your website.
It allows search engines to crawl better into your website and is the complete index of your blog that you want the search engine see.
For any ordinary website, you can create a sitemap file using any online sitemap generator and then submit it to webmaster offered by Google and Bing.
But for WordPress blogs, you have to use plugins that will automatically go on updating your sitemap file whenever you publish new blog posts. This way, you don’t have to put effort into submitting your new content pages to your sitemaps.
Submitting sitemaps to Google Search console:
For submitting a site to Google console, you have to use the Google search console tool. For doing this, you first have to verify your site in Google search console and then you have to log in to the webmaster tool dashboard using the link given below:
After you have logged in to your Google Webmaster tool dashboard, on the right-hand side, look for an option called “Sitemaps”.
From there, click on “More” option to see all the sitemaps you have submitted. And you can submit a new sitemap from there too.
If you are using a site with a lot of images in it, you should use an image for a sitemap or you can make a video sitemap. Once you have submitted your blog, it may take some time to see the index status if your blog is new.