Get Your Site Indexed Quicker With Google XML Sitemaps
One of the free and useful tools that Google provides to website owners are the Google Webmaster Tools, also known as the Google Search Console. Use of the Webmaster Tools will have a great impact on your SEO strategy. Instead of having to wait until the Googlebot crawls your site, you can actually inform Google about your site and about new pages that you created. This not only leads to more of your pages getting indexed, but it also means that your pages will get indexed into the search results much quicker.
One of the features of the Search Console is the ability to submit a sitemap to Google. A sitemap is an XML file that contains all the URLs of your site; essentially, it acts as a map of your website. When you submit a sitemap to Google, you are not only informing Google of all the existing URLs of your site — you will also be updating Google in real time.
Whenever you update your site and add a new URL, the sitemap will be updated as well. And when the sitemap gets updated, it will immediately inform Google of the changes. This will lead to your new URL’s getting indexed very quickly, instead of having to wait days, weeks or even months.
But where can you get a sitemap of your website? If you are using WordPress, the answer is simple. Google XML Sitemaps is a free plugin that will generate a sitemap of your site. Once the sitemap is created, all you have to do is copy and paste the file into the associated field in your Search Console. You can also submit the same sitemap to Bing and Yahoo, using the Bing Webmaster Tools. You are then set to go.
