Find me on Google!

New sitemap indexes blog posts on search engines

By: Evan Lee
June 21, 2024 | Website News, Web Dev

This is a bit embarrassing. But after nearly a whole year online, my blog posts can only just now be found through a Google search.

How’s that? Well, I’ve finally gotten around to adding a sitemap of the website for search engines to index. This means each and every page can now appear in search results without needing a specific URL.

Previously, only my home page could be found through a Google Search. That’s great for the few people specifically trying to find my website, but for everyone else searching up random topics that I may have covered, any related blog posts to them were hidden.

So with this new sitemap, my content will hopefully become more visible to everyone beyond my meager following on social media.

This is something I really should have added much earlier, especially since I already write meta tags for each page describing their content - that helps with search engine optimization. But the task of creating the sitemap itself seemed overly complicated, tedious, and something I just didn’t feel like dealing with before.

Having been on vacation this past week though, I finally decided to just push myself into getting it done. And I found out that it’s actually pretty easy to generate one.

Sitemap of my website as a tree graph showing some errors

I used a program called “Screaming Frog SEO Spider” that crawled through every single page of my website and created an entire XML sitemap for me.

It even pointed out link issues I had on certain pages that caused errors when clicked, along with some other problems I’ve now been able to fix.

I like this program, it’s easy to use and packed with lots of useful website analysis tools, but it’s only free for up to 500 links. While I currently only have around 50 page links, I also have nearly 200 image links and I’m not sure if those count towards the limit.

I guess we’ll see when we get there. I need to start writing more blogs again anyway, I’ve been slacking.

So, with this little update comes a new type of post I’d like to do more often to get back into it. Just short pieces here and there that aren’t really worth promoting like I usually do with my more beefy blogs, but are easy to write casually and throw online.

I’ve also been told by my girlfriend that I better write at least two new blog posts by the end of my two week vacation.

So this counts as one, Leighah ;)