Lesson Details:
January 31, 2020
Video Transcription: Now that you've got your google webmaster set up we're going to create a sitemap right away the easiest way to do that is search google for xml sitemap you will probably get this XML - sitemap as the first result it's a very common free sitemap generator we're gonna click on it if your website is 500 pages or less which is when you first open your site it's 500 pages or less it's free if you want a pro sitemap like a lot of pages you see like thousands and thousands over a million pages there is a paid version it's very very affordable you can see it's only like 349 a month so it's very cheap but since most of us will be using the free version let's just get back to the free version what happens is you're gonna enter your URL here and you're gonna say start it's going to begin working something like this it's gonna be basically doing some work and it's gonna go to your website it's gonna basically walk through all the links and create a little map for them and then when it's done it's going to now give you an option to download it and that's what you're going to do because when you download it you're gonna be able to upload it immediately to webmaster tools so when you are back at webmaster tools on the Left panel here you click on the sitemaps area sitemaps it's gonna take you to your sitemaps so the sitemap that you download from the site map generator put that anywhere on your site usually at the root of your site it's not something customers will see but it's just gonna be appear in your folder structure and then you're gonna say something like this it's going to be a problem eurocom / root sitemap XML you just upload that file that's generated for you you upload it there and then you say submit as you can see I've already submitted it and you'll see that it's successful and it's got a hundred and twelve pages on my site it's mostly content pages that I've written like blog posts and that's it so there's a couple of points on this let's say you have a hundred and twenty pages and for some reason the sitemap only found 112 that means that some pages that are not found are not what's called crawlable meaning there's no link to that page from anywhere else.
If you start on the home page you can't navigate to the pages that are missing so what you have to do is troubleshoot some pages are not linked and basically just find the pages are not that are not linked and link to them and rerun the sitemap creator so that the sitemap has exactly the number of pages that are on your site if you're not true but crawling is I'll show you what that is as an example we'll use my website so this is my site and what Google does or the sitemap generator does it takes that links all the links that are on this page the home page and it goes to the links for example the books and it collects more links you see there's a more links and then it goes to all of those links okay so it goes to those links and it goes to those links so it goes to all the links on this site that are interlinked and that's how it finds all the pages if some pages are not found that means they are not linked on your page so what you must do is go and link to the pages make sure that it's linked you basically add a hyperlink to the pages that you want found and then you go and recreate your sitemap re-upload your sitemap in Google webmasters and then Google will know okay now you have to crawl that page and that's how you make sure that all your pages are crawlable and they have a chance of being indexed being indexed just means that Google is aware of your page it doesn't mean that the page is showing up in the search results yet that's the next step but first Google has to crawl your site then it has to index the site or then it has to index every page on the site and then it's going to decide where all those pages are gonna rank in search results.
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