What is a Sitemap and why do you need one!?
Welcome to episode 7 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and today we will talk about Sitemap in SEO. It’s a very important step because, without it, your site may not be indexed by Google.
So then, therefore, you may not be found today. We’re talking about sitemaps before we start on what a sitemap is. I also want to note that a tutorial video will be available on the website, or you can click here.
So you can find that tutorial there, and it will guide you through how to do everything we will discuss. This will be one of the first real tutorial episodes, other than episode 6, which was about The Biggest Blog Writing Hack That Will Change Your Life. So if you didn’t check out episode number 6, definitely check that out.
So the sitemaps are a list of all your website’s pages. So it’s an index of all of the pages on your website, and what’s going to happen is creating and submitting this index to Google is going to allow them to know what’s on your site. What it’s about, what pages are there, etc?
So it gives them a little bit more information about your site, and one of the first things you will want to do is make sure that Google can access your site or any search engine can access your site. The reason is that if you don’t have a robots.txt file, they will not know what your site is.
So robots.txt is a file that allows the Google bot, Bing bot, and Yahoo bots to search your website and know the content. Now with the robots.txt file, you can also disallow pages from being crawled, or you can disallow certain text or pages from crawling your website.
So the first step is to go and set up Google Search Console, and you’re going to log in using the Gmail account you want to have associated with your website. I would also recommend that this particular Gmail account be the same one you use for analytics, ads, and anything else connected to your site. It’ll make everything so much easier for you.
So once you’re into that particular website, you’re going to go to the home menu, then you’re going to click settings, and you’re going to click connected accounts. Then you’re going to click Connect account, and you’re going to log into the Google account that you want to connect to your site. If you have multiple Google accounts, make sure that you have selected the correct one. Then you’re going to go ahead and click allow. So the second portion is that we need to ensure that your robots.txt file is configured to allow crawling.
So to add this to Google, I’m going to go to the search console, and all I would do is go to the left-hand side and click on sitemaps, then under add a new sitemap. I’m going to type the rest of the URL in that sitemap, and then I’m going to submit that, and it’s going to submit that to Google, and you’re going to see a little status message that says success.
With Wix, I’m going to go ahead and go through a little bit of what you need to do in Wix. There’s a little work for you, but it is important to note that Wix only submits the sitemap. If you use the Wix SEO Wiz, that is the only time Wix submits the sitemap for you.
If you do not use that, you must create your sitemap and submit it manually. It will create it for you but not submit it for you. The other thing to know with Wix is that they will not submit any subsequent sitemaps. So, if you add pages or change any pages, they will not go to the subsequent sitemaps to Google.
So every time you change, you will want to manually add that to your Google Search Console. Now your Wix sitemap is going to be whatever your website is. So it’s going to be your website com/sitemap.XML. So that is what you will enter into the Google search console, and that’s what Wix users need to know.
You can hire an SEO search engine optimizer, or even your tech-savvy VA can do it for you. So those are some options that you can do. This is one of the first basic steps of starting to optimize your website. You want to make sure that your website is getting indexed and crawled by Google.
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