Hey Reader!
I've got a quick win for you today! π
I shared a question box on my Instagram story the other day asking what you'd like to learn about, and one question I got was how to submit your sitemap to Google!
You can think of your sitemap as a map of your site that helps Google navigate it.
Google can typically crawl your site even if you don't submit your sitemap, but having it in Google Search Console can help and is considered best practice.
If you have the Yoast SEO plugin (recommended), it will automatically generate your XML sitemap.
You can find this in the Yoast plugin under Settings > Site features > APIs:
If you click View the XML sitemap, it should take you to something like https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.
For example, my sitemap is https://brokenovenbaking.com/sitemap_index.xml!
This is what should be submitted in Google Search Console (GSC).
In your GSC account, navigate to Sitemaps (under Indexing) and enter your sitemap and hit SUBMIT.
For example:
And that's it! Sitemap submitted β
Pro tip! π
Want an easy way to get a list of all of your posts and dates of when they were last modified? Go to your sitemap and click your post sitemap!
You can highlight and copy the entire list and paste it over into a spreadsheet. Then you can add notes and organize the data however you like!
This comes in handy when you're looking for old posts that might need updating π
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