We are wrapping up the series of Yoast with video 4 of 4. This video walks you through how to submit your sitemap to Google.
Video Transcript
Hey, y’all. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name’s Kori Ashton and this is Yusuf Chowdhury. We are finishing up part 4 of a series on Yoast. I’m gonna move this up a little bit so we can see ourselves.
-Yes.
-There ya go. Now you can see your hair. You look fabulous. (laughing) All right! He is actually going to steer this whole ship today and finish up with you.
What you’ve learned so far is how to install Yoast. Then part 2 was all about how to do keyword research. Then part 3, if you’ve watched that, you now know the basics of using Yoast … amazing … And now he is going to walk you through how to actually submit your site map.
-Yes.
-Right. He’s going to walk you through all sorts of coolness, so stick around. It’s going to be good. We’ll put the link below to the three different videos as well. If you haven’t seen part 1, 2 and 3, please be sure to check those out. They’re incredible videos all about using Yoast inside of your WordPress website.
And, speaking of WordPress, we’ve got WP Engine here, WP Elevation, and WP101. That’s right. Over here. They’re awesome resources for you. If you’re using WordPress, you need to be checking them out. Great hosting. WP Elevation has awesome mentorship for anybody who is going to be a freelancer or subcontractor wanting to grow their business using WordPress making some money.
-Absolutely. Gotta be making some moola.
-Yes. Make some money.
-Yes.
-And WP101 has awesome video tutorials for you to learn how to go even further with WordPress. Check them out in all of your spare time. All right. You ready? You’re finishing it up.
-I’m always ready.
-Here we go. Part 4. Yusuf. Take it away.
-Awesome. Again, for the fourth time I’m gonna take over. Feels so great all the time. Yes. I need to get ready.
Pay attention because this is no joke. Excuse me. Yes. Right now. So.
Just want to let you know on the last episode we talked about how to use the Yoast plugin and how to optimize the pages. You need to apply the same concept on the blog post. Once you optimize all the pages—I forgot to mention that you can run the site with this web tool called WooRank. That’s woorank.com. Used to be that you can use the first option for free, so go ahead and try that. What it does …
Oh, one second. Let me remove this screen. First, let me shrink it. After that I’m going to remove it because you know I’m amazingly distracting. Okay. Let me move that out of the way. There you are. I’m out of the way.
This is the website that you can go and click Try if for Free. What it will do is it will run the onsite analysis and it will tell you exactly which area the onsite optimization is missing or alt tags or keyphrases or links and broken links and so forth. It’s really great. Use that tool to kind of guide you to make sure that before you submit your website to Google for indexing, which we’re going to talk about today on how to use the webmaster tools to do that. This is a good practice. Make sure you go here and check the status.
The cool thing about this tool is that it will actually give you an explanation for every task that needs to be completed. Secondly, you need to make sure that your website already got the Google Analytics installed. Then we’re going to come back to Google webmaster tool (aka Google Search Console) that they just changed the name recently. And we’ll show you how you can submit it for indexing and why this is important. Because once you optimize all the pages and blog posts, you definitely need the Google spider or the bot of a software to come in and index it and know that you exist.
So this is one of the fastest ways to do it because you don’t have to wait a couple of weeks or a month for the website to be index, so that’s why we need to use the webmaster tool. The difference between the Google webmaster tool (or Google Search Console) and Google Analytics: this tool actually helps you by informing you if there are any errors on the back end or any errors in the site map or if your website was having some type of issue with the server or malware. This is a very great tool.
Sometimes, if Google … let’s say they found out that you had some issues, or if you’re using unethical SEO strategies, they can actually email you and let you know that you need to take care of it before they penalize you. This is something very important that every website should have. [cartoon laughter] Okay. Let’s get back to the business right here.
Going back to the back end of your website, you’re going to click typically on the SEO Yoast plugin. You’ll see that there are several options. What I want you to do is click on this one right here. XML Sitemap. Once you click that, it will take you to this section right here. There is another box that says, “You can find your XML Sitemap here. XML Sitemap.” So you can click on this one and what it will do is it will generate a sitemap for you so you can submit it.
Now, if you’re wondering how this is done traditionally, typically most developers would go to a website like this one here— XML-Sitemaps.com—and you enter the website and you will get a .TXT file. Then you will download that .TXT file or save it then upload it back to the server. This is how it is done in the traditional sense. But thanks to Yoast, I don’t have to do that stuff. Those are for geeks or smart people. Me, I’m too lazy. So I want to do something very fast and quick. That’s the benefit of being lazy sometime.
You’re going to click on this option right here. Once you do that, there you go. The Yoast plugin automatically generated a sitemap for you. You’re going to click on each section of the sitemap. It shows you all the links on this website. This is very important for the Google spider because what it does it helps the spider to go through every single page on your website so it can properly index everything. Does that make sense? Okay. You’ve got the sitemap.
The next step is go back to your Google webmaster tool (aka Google Search Console) and your website. To do that, make sure your Google Analytics is open and also, of course, your website. I’m going to take only this part off of the .com/ … only this part I’m just going to copy this part only … sitemap_index.xml … Okay? Not the whole thing. Then go to Google webmaster tool (aka Google Search Console) and click right here, Add a Property. I’m going to go ahead and …
Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize. I made a quick mistake. I forgot to add the website. What did I do? What did I do? Okay. Here you go. You need to add the website first. I’m going to go here, add the website. [inaudible comment] Quick little confusion. Hope you’re not overly confused. There you go.
I’m going to add this website because it wasn’t added. There was a Google Analytics but not the webmaster tool. And what happens right now is it will give you four options in order for you to verify it … or five … Technically, now, here it says that it can verify through GoDaddy, but I’m going to use another option which is through Google Analytics because we already have Analytics installed. Click on verify. Hopefully it’s going to work. And, yes, it did work. Ha hah! All right. Click continue. Now, there you go. We are done.
Once you add the website to Google webmaster tool, right here, where it says crawl, click on this one [ Crawl ] then click on Sitemaps. [excited sound effect] Once you’ve got the sitemap, remember to go back and copy this part [ sitemap_index.xml ]. Go back here. And before you submit it, we need to be sure that the sitemap is correctly generated.
Click this [ Add Test Sitemap ]. Go ahead and paste that portion of the sitemap and click on Test Sitemap. And make sure before you run the … before you hit this Submit Sitemap you have to be sure that you hit this part right here [ Test Sitemap ] because it will tell you whether it’s okay or not. There you go. Test complete. Click on View test result. Viola. There you go. There are no errors. You’re good to go. What I need to do is hit Close sitemap test. Go back [ click Add Test Sitemap ] and now I can hit Submit Sitemap. Boom. Sitemap submitted successfully. Refresh.
And there you go. It says Pending status. It might take, like, you know, 24 hours to get the status. If there are any errors further than this, it will let you know. It will give you some information right here so you can go back and fix it. This is how it is submitted. Isn’t that awesome? Once you do this, I also recommend that you go to Fetch as Google and do another submission to make sure that every page is properly set up. You can click this one right here [ Fetch and Render ]. I did select the Desktop option. And the second one will be the mobile device. I need to make sure that I’m submitting this for the desktop version and also for the mobile device.
As you can see, it says that it is ready to be submitted for indexing. Go ahead and click and select the second one here. And the same thing for … and that’s it.
There you go folks. This is how you submit and you must submit your website for Google after you optimize all the pages.
I hope this was helpful. If y’all have any more questions please do ask. We’ll see you next time. [cartoon laughter]
Why isn’t it closing? Ah. There you go.
