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- The best way to have an organized site
is to have sitemaps.
The two main types of sitemaps are,
HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps.
A HTML sitemap is for your website users.
This allows for your website users
to quickly find content on your website.
An XML sitemap is a sitemap for the search engines
and you can easily tell them what the pages
on your website is about.
This helps them to crawl your web pages a lot quicker.
If you don't currently have an XML sitemap,
you can go to xml-sitemaps.com, and you can download
one there and upload it to your website.
Once you have your XML sitemap,
you can literally give it to the search engines.
This helps them to crawl your website a lot quicker,
and you can do this by using tools.
The first tool is the Google Search Console tool.
I'm going to be showing you how to use it.
It's important to remember that you must sign up
for an account with Google Search Console.
If you have a Gmail account,
then this up process is a lot easier.
This is the page that you're going to see
when signing up for a Google Search Console account.
And then you want to click start now.
Once you have registered for an account,
you actually need to verify that the website
you have submitted is your own website.
You will see this page here, where it shows you details
of how to exactly verify your site.
If you face any verification issues,
you can contact your developer
who can help you out with this process.
If you don't have a developer,
then I suggest that you contact your hosting company
and they should provide you information
on how you can quickly do this.
Alternatively, if you're using a website provider
such as Wix or Weebly,
then they should have information on their site
on how you can quickly verify your site
with Google Search Console.
This is how it will look when your Google Search Console
account has been set up.
There's no data in this particular site
because I am just using this as a way of instructing you.
However, you will see data in here when you actually plug
your website in to the Google Search Console.
It's important to note that when you sign up
for a Google Search Console account,
you'll get an email notification telling you
of all of the important steps that you need to take
in order to register and sign up
for Google Search Console appropriately.
You want to make sure you go through all of those steps
so that Google are not missing any information.
Just quickly, some of the most important ones
are to make sure you have all of your website variations,
and you can add your variations by coming up to here,
clicking on here, and add a property.
These properties or variations, are different ways
people can actually find your website.
As you can see here, the first variation
has http://psmentoring.com.
And the second one is exactly the same thing,
but without the www dot.
I may also have https://mywebsite.com.
And if you have one of those sites,
you want to add that property as well,
because Google sees these as different sites.
You can also use a Google Search Console
to see how your website is performing in search.
And you can go into this performance tab here,
and this will show you how many times
your site is showing up in search,
and generally how well you're performing.
The most important aspect
of your Google Search Console is your sitemap.
You can click sitemap here,
and this shows you how to exactly
submit your sitemap to Google.
Similar to the Google Search Console,
there is a tool that you can use to submit
your sitemap to Bing and Yahoo.
As you may know, Bing and Yahoo are also major
search engines, so you want to capitalize on the traffic
that they can potentially send to your website.
The signup process to Bing webmaster tools is very similar
to that of Google search console.
However, there are a few things that I want to point out,
and that is when you submit your sitemap,
you need to add it here.
And also when you're going through this variation process,
you want to make sure that all of these boxes are checked.
When you submit your site to Google,
or to Bing webmaster tools,
you will actually get notified via email,
if these sites have any issues indexing your website.
You want to make sure that you give them permission
to notify you of any issues.
That is why it's important to go through that step
in Bing webmaster tools, but with Google,
it's automatically done for you.
Lastly, ensure that when you register for these accounts,
you're registering with an email that you're checking often,
so if there is a crawling issue on your site,
you can actually get notified and you don't miss that email.
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