Today I'm going to show you how to install an XML sitemap to your site and how to register it with Google Webmaster Tools. XML sitemaps are more or less essential for any site. If you don't have one, the search engines will find you because the XML sitemap is a little file that sits on your server and basically explains to any search engine robot what has changed recently, so there's been a new page on your site, it will the sitemap will be updated, and the search engine robot informed. All this means is that your new posts will get indexed quicker on the search engines if you have a sitemap than if you didn't. So first step to getting a sitemap is to load a plug in in WordPress. So you go in into the back end of WordPress and add new plugin.
And then you'll search for Google XML sitemaps. And it's that one, Google XML sitemaps with an S on the end, click OK. and activate. And now once it's activated, you need to make sure it's generated. So you can either go to settings there, or settings. XML sitemap there. Either way does the same thing.
And here it says the sitemap hasn't been built yet. Click here to build it for the first time. So just click there. And then it'll tell you that this sitemap has been created. So now we should inform Google Webmaster Tools of the sitemap so they know where to find it. And this is a necessary step to take anyway, because Google Webmaster Tools is such a handy tool to have in your arsenal, okay.
And to do that, you go to web Webmaster Tools. So if I just search for Webmaster Tools, And you can log into Webmaster Tools with your Google ID. And this is my Google Webmaster Tools with all the sites I have registered. And so I'll add another site. And we'll give the URL there and continue. And now it's gonna ask you to verify that you own it.
And there are some methods here. If you click here, you can upload an HTML file to the site, add an HTML tag tag to the home page. And you can even do it by your domain name provider. So there's several ways of proving that you do in fact, own the site. But the recommended method is var analytics. And as we've already registered at Google Analytics, Google sort of already knows we own the site.
So all we have to do is click Verify here. And great it says Congratulations, you've verified your ownership. So click Continue. And basically, we got no data here again, because it hasn't had time to crawl the site. Of course, I hear this very useful because if you do have any problems with this tool. Google will tell you here in Webmaster Tools, and if the problem is very bad, you'll even get an email about however, we still have to submit the sitemap.
So we'll click here, sitemap, add test sitemap. And we'll add the sitemap here and the addresses the sitemap is always having loaded that plug in the sitemap XML on the root of the server. So we'll just submit that, and it says sitemap submitted. we refresh the page now. We'll see it is already registered. And it's got 14 page method.
So all well and good, the sitemap is registered at Google Webmaster Tools. We won't have to do that. Again, the XML file will be sitting there merrily on the server, informing Google of your latest pages and posts and changes to the site. One last thing to do, however, and this is something I always do just to inform other search engines, not just Just Google of the Sitemaps existence, all search engines use the sitemap protocol. So what you can do is create a txt file. And you do that in TextEdit on the Mac or notepad on the PC.
And in it have this user agent colon, asterisk, sitemap colon, and then the web address for your sitemap. And you just put that on the root of your domain, the root of your website. I'll show you how to do that now. So we go into file Zilla and this is a website's and the root is inside public underscore HTML. And there is all the WordPress files and we put it there. So there is the robots.
Txt file, which explains where the sitemap is kept. Also. Also you can see here the sitemap XML on on the website that we've just built a few seconds ago and in this text file is what I show A few seconds ago saying where the XML sitemap is also on the robots. txt if you wanted to, you can actually disallow some folders and tell Google or other search engines not to visit certain areas of the site. But we won't be doing that this time, because we're quite happy for all the search engines to view all parts of the site. So we'll just put that in there.
And that's done. So that's everything you need to do with Sitemaps. You need to make sure you have an XML sitemap on the roof of your site, and you need to register it with Google Webmaster Tools. Okay. Thank you.