In the world of SEO, sitemap submissions are one of those things that can easily be forgotten about, but for the amount of work it takes to get done, you may as well do it. Most smaller sites don't really need to make sitemap submissions because Google should already know about all the pages on your site. However, that's not to say that there are no benefits to performing this task for a smaller site, and certainly if you have a much larger site or an E-commerce site, then making regular sitemap submissions can be a nice way to make sure that Google is fully aware of all of the pages, products and categories that you have on your site.
One of the main benefits of making regular sitemap submissions is that when you change your site, or you add a new pages, Google learns about them more quickly, and therefore they can get indexed and start their journey up the rankings quicker. Even if you don’t make a manual sitemap submission to alert Google to any updates you’ve made to your site, the search engine will find them when it does its next periodic crawl of your site – but to skip waiting for Google to essentially ‘get around to you’, you need to make a manual sitemap submission.
Nevertheless, it’s important to realise that sitemap submissions aren’t a magic solution for any and all SEO issues. Sorry to break it to you, but even if you are making regular sitemap submissions, you still need to carry out on-page SEO tasks like SERP snippet or alt text composition, and off page tasks like backlink building. Sitemap submissions are really more of a way to make sure that your hard work in these areas gets noticed and takes effect earlier.
Most sitemaps these days are made using XML, and they're basically written in robot-readable language which allows Google-bot to find the pages on your site and understand when they were last updated. An HTML sitemap is a sitemap designed for people. And most websites these days don't really need them because navigation on websites has improved so much since their heyday.
So how do you create a sitemap? Well a lot of Content Management Systems these days actually come with sitemaps built-in. So if you're using something like WordPress or Squarespace then maintaining an up-to-date sitemap can suddenly become a lot easier. Nevertheless, even if you make use of the helping hand that a CMS offers in this area, you could still need to make the actual sitemap submission yourself, so we’ll go through that now.
In order to make a manual sitemap submission you first need to go to Google Search Console, and in order to use Google Search Console you need to have a Google account. So go ahead and create one if you need to, then log into Google using your new credentials. Once this is done, the next step is to verify ownership of your site. There are a number of ways to do that and an earlier blog of mine – ‘Verifying Site Ownership With Google Search Console’ - will help you do just that. From here on we’ll assume that ownership is verified, and that the site you want to make a sitemap submission for shows up in the drop-down box in the top-left. If it does, we can now get on with the actual sitemap submission itself…
Once you have the site selected in the drop-down box we mentioned earlier, search console, look to the menu on the left hand side. One of the options there will be ‘Sitemaps’. Click that, and then – in the page that opens to the right of the menu and you're going to find a heading that says ‘Add a new Sitemap’ alongside a ‘Submit’ button. Finally – as you may have guessed - this is where you make your sitemap submission. Just paste the URL for your sitemap into the textbox, hit the ‘Submit’ button, and you’re done!