Just a few days ago, in the post of Google Blog Search Strategy, I mentioned in the comments that by submitting the posts in your blog to Google Sitemaps might help Google to update your latest posts. Hence, it will increase the chances of your readers to reach your blog through Google Blog Search.

Usually, your posts will get indexed by Google when its spider crawls to your blog, but this is not guaranteed when it will come. Instead of waiting for the spider to come, why not submit all your posts to Google Sitemaps and let all of them get indexed as soon as possible? In fact, my blog has got more than 18,000 20,000 pages (Updated!) indexed by Google, I strongly think partly due to my frequent submission to Google Sitemaps.

Some of you, including Andrew, might not have submitted your posts to Google Sitemaps and would like to know how to do it, right? I will try my best to show you how. However, I will break this post into three parts :-

• Part 1. For anyone using any blog script, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Blogsome, Blogspot, etc.
• Part 2. For WordPress user.
• Part 3. For Movable Type user. I am not a MT user, but I’ll see what I can do about it. :)

First of all, you will need a Google Sitemaps account. If you already have a GMail account, go login to Google Sitemaps. If you still do not have a GMail account, drop me a line or two to my GMail account, I will send an invitation to you right away.

Next, you will need to generate a sitemap to submit to Google Sitemaps. In this post, I will only cover how to generate sitemap using online tools.

Use online tools to create sitemaps for your blog
There are a few useful online tools available, my favourite will be the one from Pingoat. Why? Because there is no advertisement (not a single one) and the interface is simple and pretty straight forward. Most important of all, it works !! :)

In the Google Sitemaps Generator, you just need to key in the following :-

• The site URL : Page that you want to create a sitemap for.
  E.g. https://www.sapiensbryan.com
• How frequent the page is updated : It depends on the speed of your update to your blog.
  If it is your homepage, and you update it at least once a day, then select Daily.
• When was the last update you made to that page : This is pretty straight forward, isn’t it. :)
• The priority of the page of your site : It depends on which page you submit.
  If it is your homepage, select 1.0. I guess nothing is more important than your homepage.

After generating the sitemap, you will need to save it down then upload it to your web server. This is where the main problem you will face if you host your blog with some free blogging service, such as Blogspot, Blogsome, etc. This is because most of them do not allow you to upload any file to the web server.

Anyway, try look for a friend with a web hosting account, then ask him/her to upload the file to the web server. Otherwise, find yourself a free file upload service which support XML file type (I guess there won’t be many). By the way, I do provide web hosting service at a competitive price, please send me a request if you are interested.

Once the file is on the web server, go to your Google Sitemaps page and choose Add Sitemaps. You will need to enter the location of your sitemap which located in the web server (E.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).

If the sitemap is successfully uploaded, you will see the sitemap is added in the list on the main page of your Google Sitemaps account and pending for Google to update it.

Until this point, you are done !! :)

Hope you enjoy this article and have fun.