I know you may have submitted your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. But Google search console it not the only place you should be submitting your sitemap to. You need to submit your sitemap to Bing webmaster tools also.
We all know that Google is not the only search engine out there are plenty of them. But I recommend optimizing your blog for top three search engines only. Google, Bing and Yandex.
By optimizing your site for the search engines I mean submitting your sitemap to these search engines for the faster indexing of your web pages.
You may have to go through my article on complete WordPress SEO guide in which I have mentioned all my basic WordPress optimizations which are essential for every blog. These optimizations shouldn't be skipped if you want to make a good use of the search engines.
Many newbie bloggers don't know what is a sitemap and how to create a sitemap. If you are the one let me clear it for you in short.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is an XML file which has the URLs within your website. This file helps the search engine crawlers to locate all the URLs of your website.
It is important because it contains all the information about your website including all posts, pages and categories which you want to be crawled by the search engine bots.
It is a map of your website, submitting it to the search engine will let search engine bots to crawl your website for faster indexing of your website pages.
Guides to create a sitemap using Google XML Process. Just in case you find it difficult, here’s another guide to create a sitemap using SEO Yoast plugin.
Step-by-Step Guide to Submit Your Sitemap To Bing Webmaster Tools
First, you need to sing up for the Bing webmaster tools using this link. When you log in into your webmaster account. The very first thing you need to do is to "add a site" from your left side dashboard menus.
Just to stay alert about your website issues you can also opt-in for alert issues from webmaster tools.
Click on the profile tab from header menu, a pop-up window will open where you can fill out your details for the account.
Now at the end of your profile window. You will see "contact preference" under messages receiving alerts set it to daily or weekly as per your requirements. I set it to daily and for Alert preferences, it would be better to check all 4 given options; crawl errors, index issues, sitemaps, and malware.
You'll get notified by the Bing webmaster tools if any issue were found regarding any of the 4 selected options.
Don't forget to "Save" at the end.
Next, you need to verify ownership of your website. For that, they have mentioned three different options to verify your website ownership for bing webmaster tools. Or you can also use this simple method to verify your bing webmaster ownership.
After you done following any given options click "Verify".
If your verification is successfully done, you will get a message about it and your site's information will start getting fetched by the tools. Or else you will get a message about unsuccessful verification. Review your verification steps if your previous attempt was unsuccessful.
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