When we create a website, one of the most common question is how to find out site in Google and many people think we need to Pay to get our site in Google. Though this is not true and getting your site in Google is easy. The very first step to let Google know about your Website presence is by submitting your blog site map. Before I share my tutorial on How to submit sitemap To google, let’s get more idea about sitemap.

What is a sitemap?

When ever you read about SEO tactics, I’m sure you must have came across something call sitemap. A Sitemap is an xml file which contains the URL’s inside your blog. This file is helpful for crawlers to find all URL’s of your blog. Though it’s up to many factor like size of your sitemap and number of URL’s in your sitemap, that crawler will follow. In short, Sitemap is a complete index of your blog which you want search engine bots to see. This wiki article on sitemap will give more technical and historical detail about sitemap.

In all White-hate SEO and even submitting sitemap to Google is one must have SEP step for any blog. As suggested by Google, Sitemap helps Google to discover those pages, which are otherwise hard to discover. Specially, one should place a reference of sitemap at the footer of their blog. This will help crawlers to follow sitemap from any page of your blog and thus crawl your blog more deeply.

Since, we know by know what sitemap is lets move to the next level.

How to Generate sitemap for your Website?

Sitemap can be generated in different ways depending upon the platform you are using for your website. For example, WordPress sitemap can be easily generated using plugin call Google XML sitemap generator plugin.  For other platform like static sites, there are many online tools and offline software’s which will help in sitemap generation. In this post, I assume you know how to generate site map and we will stay tuned to how to submit sitemap to Google.

Submitting sitemap to Google Webmaster tool:

When we talk about submitting sitemap to Google, it means submitting it to Google Webmaster tool. I assume, you have already verified your site in Google Webmaster tool and logged into your webmaster tool dashboard here. So by now, you have your sitemap link ready with you. If you have used any offline tool to generate sitemap, upload it to root of your site like /sitemap.xml. Here is how my blog sitemap looks like: ShoutMeLoud Sitemap.

Inside your Webmaster tool dashboard, on right hand side you will see an option call Sitemaps. Click on More to see all submitted sitemap or you can submit a new sitemap from there.

Depending on what type of sitemap you have generated, you can submit it from here. If you are running a site with lots of images, I suggest you to create an image sitemap, as we already discussed in Image SEO optimization that how much useful image traffic is for us. Similarly, you can create Video sitemap for your Website. For WordPress blog, you can create Image sitemap using this and video sitemap using this plugin.

Similarly you can submit sitemap to Bing which is also very useful for your content discovery on Bing search engine. For a website with big sitemap, it’s important to break it down into smaller sitemaps and then submit submit to Google, bing or any other major search engine.

Do let us know if you have done sitemap submission for your website or not? What other SEO things do you do for faster indexing of your blog?