An XML sitemap is an XML file which contains a list of URLs on your website. It helps to Search engines to better understand your website while crawling it. The main use of sitemap is to get crawl your site effectively on major Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Step by step guide to create Sitemap

To create XML Sitemap, numerous plugin available on WordPress. One of the best plugin is Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin will generate an XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your web pages and blogs.

To activate this plugin Log in to your WordPress account, Go to Plugin and Click Add New. Then search XML Sitemap in the search box.

Once you search you will see the different plugin in the search result. Click Install Google XML Sitemaps plugin and Click activate.

After activating Google XML Sitemaps plugin, Go to setting in your WordPress and Click XML-Sitemap to access sitemap plugin.

Now you can able to see your website sitemap URL. For my website, the sitemap URL is https://www.searchrankingtips.com/sitemap.xml show in below screenshot.

Now you are ready with your XML Sitemap index file.

Next, Create Google Search Console account (Previously called Google Webmaster Tools). Google Search Console is the tools by Google which help you to monitor your website performance, crawl status, site indexing, crawl errors, to analyse your site performance on Google Search and lot more.

To create account in Google Search Console go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Then Sign up with your Gmail account.

Next, Add your website on Google Search Console by entering your website URL.

Then you need to verify your website using anyone of the convenient methods.

Google Search Console has different methods to verify your ownership of your website. The first method, Download HTML verification file on your Google Search Console account and Upload the file to your website using Cpanel.

An alternative method, you just copy the HTML tag on your Google Search Console account and paste it to header.php file on your website.

Once you paste HTML tag on header.php file then click verify.

Then go to Crawl → Sitemaps and add your sitemap URL as shown in below screenshot.

Now you have successfully created sitemap for your website which helps for better crawling on search engines.

Follow our Facebook feeds for regular updates.