Now a day’s website is what every business needs; businesses can only operate globally with a website to find large numbers of new customers. Without a website, customers can raise the question about the validity of the business. A website makes a great impression on people. It is an actual business. In this context, I will tell you what a sitemap is and how to set up an optimized SEO-boosting blog sitemap.
What is a blog Sitemap?
A blog sitemap is a map of your blog or website showing how all your pages are connected. It’s an important tool for SEO and will help you organize the content on your site.
The first step in creating a blog sitemap is to create a list of all the pages on your site and rank them by priority, using criteria like popularity, relevance, or importance.
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that help search engines to find, crawl, and index all your website information, content, product, and services. Sitemaps also help search engines determine which pages are most important. Before we talk about sitemaps, it is important to explain the types of sitemaps.
Types of sitemaps
There are four types of sitemaps.
Normal XML Sitemap
It is an ordinary and common blog sitemap link to different pages of your website.
Video sitemap
It is used to help search engines understand video-type content, like a video used in a blog or website, and which video can be viewed best.
News sitemap
It helps search engines up to date find content and index sites that are approved for google.
Image sitemap
It helps search engines to find and index all images anchored/hosted on your website.
What is the purpose of creating an XML sitemap, and why does a blog need it?
Search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, Duck Duck go, etc., use crawlers to organize information and index it on the web. XML sitemaps help crawlers read the information on your website and index it. Also, sitemaps tell search engines when the page is updated.
Advantages of an XML sitemap
It helps search engines crawlers to index your website pages and information
It helps search engines to crawl and index your website
XML sitemaps help search engines determine what kind of information on your website
It helps search engines which content and pages updated that can help in a new ranking.
It helps with instant indexation of your content on google.
How to submit a blog sitemap in Google Search Console?
Before we set up a blog sitemap, we should submit our website in the Google Search console. Google search console is a tool and report of your website that helps web admins to measure your blog search traffic and performance, fix issues/errors, and analyze your website’s past results and performance.
While submitting your website in the Google search console, you should click the blue button Start now. Once you click, a page will open. Welcome to the Google search console.
Here you will see two options for adding your website URLs to the google search console.
You will need to follow these steps to submit a sitemap of your blog to Google Search Console.
Go to the Google Search Console website and sign in with your Google account. If this is your first time using Search Console, you must add your website to your account.
Click on Sitemaps under the “Index” heading in the left-hand menu.
Click on the (Add/Test Sitemap) button in the top right corner of the page.
Enter the URL of your sitemap in the field provided. Your sitemap should be in the form of http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. Click the “Submit” button to submit your sitemap.
It may take time for Google to process your sitemap and for the pages in your sitemap to be indexed. You can check the status of your sitemap by clicking on the sitemap’s URL in the list of sitemaps on the Sitemaps page.
Conclusion
To create a blog sitemap, you will need to identify all the pages on the blog that you want to include, organize the pages in a logical hierarchy, and use appropriate tags to provide additional information about each page.
You can then use a sitemap generator tool to create the actual sitemap in XML format and save it on your server, ensuring it is accessible to search engines. It is important to regularly update your sitemap as you add new content to the blog to ensure that search engines have the most up-to-date information about your site.
