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The SITS Girls

The Secret to Success is Support

Does Google Read Your Blog?

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You spend a lot of time crafting excellent content for your blog. However, it’s important to ensure that Google and other search engines read your site. Does Google know your content is there?

Learn how to create and submit a sitemap for your blog and submit it to Google.

How to submit a Google Sitemap

This is where Sitemaps come in to play, and luckily, there is a quick process required to submit yours to search engines- especially Google.  Essentially a list of pages on your site, Google explains, “sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.” While Google regularly crawls content, submitting a sitemap ensures that your content is not missed, or even crawled a bit sooner.

So how do you create a sitemap? Google gives you the format, that is also used for Yahoo and Bing, among other search engines, in their Creating Sitemaps help. Or, you can try an online generator like this one found here to create a specific one for you. Are you on WordPress? (Brownie points if you are!) There are several plugins that will generate sitemaps for you, like the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Once you create your sitemap in the manner that is comfortable to you, go to Google’s Webmaster Tools to submit it. Or, follow the alternate instructions from Google here. Just be sure to submit according to the guidelines- Google’s attention can determine whether everyone and their mother is reading your site— or if it is just your mother reading the site.

Have you submitted your sitemap yet?

About Tracie Nall

Tracie lives in Arizona with her husband, teen daughter, and more books than her shelves will hold. She spends her days writing and editing. Many of her words end up on her blog, From Tracie. Find Tracie on Twitter @FromTracie and on Instagram where she takes pictures of things that are yellow.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Arun Singh says

    Hi,

    It is very important for any blogger that our blogs are indexing or caching by Google or not. You have really posted a nice post and shared your experience with us. Thanks for your nice post and looking forward to see some more new posts from you.

  2. Chetan Gupta says

    Hey Ashley
    hope you are well
    and you are absolutely right about this topic. But i want to share one thing to you and all the readers that their are many wordpress plugins for generating xml sitemaps like google sitemap plugin by bestwebsoft. And i really liked a plugin which covers most of the requirement of seo that is ‘wordpress seo by yoast’. This plugin is for per post optimization and keyword submission. Speaciality of this plugin is that you can also create a xml sitemap using this plugin. I personally use this plugin. You don’t need to install extra plugin like google sitemap plugin and all that. And google webmaster tool is really a god gifted tool for the webmasters.

  9. Robin |Farewell Stranger says

    Woot! You’re hitting all the stuff I want and need to do. Happy new blogging year to me 🙂

    • Robin | Farewell, Stranger says

      Adrienne, if you go to the settings for this plugin it will let you build the sitemap – make sure you’ve done that. It will tell you Google has been notified (and Bing) but I’m still trying to figure out if that means I need to submit…

      • adrienne says

        That’s where I’m at. It appears everything is in order b/c it says everybody’s tracking. But, I really have no idea what any of those settings mean! Or if I’m supposed to do anything else to make sure it’s working. I’m not techie.

  12. Alison @ racingtales says

    Thanks so much! I had no idea how to do this, or even that I should do it. The instructions were easy to follow and I created and submitted my sitemap in no time. SITS Girls rock!

  13. mohit says

    Just submitted Sitemap for my blog was not knowing this earlier and I think this was the only reason for no traffic to my blog from Google.

  15. Shashee says

    I’m a bit ashamed to say this but there is a ton of things I still know nothing about and I have researched for quite sometime. I am going to submit mine in a few…Thank you for the information, it is very helpful!!!

  16. Nicole says

    Thanks for this article! I am not the best technologically and love reading about ways to better my blog. I starting following your instructions, hoping it wouldn’t take me forever to figure out, and I’m happy to say that I finished it within 20 minutes. WOOHOO!

  19. [email protected] says

    Ok, I’m still hoping to get some help with this. Since it seems like everyone but me is getting it done, I must not be ‘getting it’. If we have to go in the back end and upload a file, etc. that does not seem like something everyone would know how to do. At least I know I don’t! I tried to verify my account with godaddy, but it said something about not being able to do it because it didn’t have a DNS file?

    • Mubashir says

      Hello,

      I have a question girls. Is there any other search engine to submit our sitemap except above listed search engines?

      Thanks

  22. [email protected] says

    Ok, I’ve done some more research and am more confused than ever. According to what I found out, if you’re going to verify your account you have to upload a file to your server, going in the back end and fttp files? Am I the only one who doesn’t know how to do this?? I’m thinking if everyone else did it and says it’s easy, I’m missing something here.

  23. [email protected] says

    Thanks Ashley, but I’m confused. I have WP, and just installed the recommended plug in. Now what? According to your instructions, I need to get the site map info from the plug in and submit to Google? Is that correct? If so, how do I do that? Thank you!

    • Margaret says

      Doreen, I also have WP and just finished submitting mine. Yes, you do have to submit to Google after installing the plugin.You want to click the link above “instructions from google here” and go from there. 🙂

  24. Mubashir says

    I was not expecting it will work for me because I think you only write for girls…!
    lolz… Just Joking…
    Now Google recieved my sitemap. Hope now my pages will index shortly…
    Thank you Girls.

  32. buttercream bakehouse says

    I really hope I have time to actually do this. Oh, and if I hear one more GREAT word about wordpress, I’ll just bang my head against the wall now. I SO want to switch over from blogger, but again, no time. Someday soon I hope to do my long laundry list of clean up and organizing my blog. the kiddos and the cake biz are taking every minute of everyday.

  39. Alethea says

    Thank you for the information. I will begin working on this now. I don’t understand a lot of the analytics, uniquie visitors, etc. but I am striving to learn.

    Blessings~
    Alethea