How to create a Google sitemap for your blog

So you have a blog and you want to create a Google sitemap for it? That’s great! You SHOULD have a sitemap for each blog you own! A sitemap will speed up your indexing and your pages will appear faster in Google search. If you have a self hosted blog, the easiest way to have a sitemap generated automatically is to install a free wordpress plugin. On most of my blogs I am using the plugin named “Google XML Sitemaps“. It has a nice settings page where you can generate a xml file or, if your blog is bigger, an archived version of the sitemap

Generate a Complete Sitemap for your Blogger Blog

This section is valid for both regular Blogger blogs (that use a .blogspot.com address) and also the self-hosted Blogger blogs that use a custom domain (like postsecret.com).
Here’s what you need to do to expose your blog’s complete site structure to search engines with the help of an XML sitemap.

1. Open the Sitemap Generator and type the full address of your blogspot blog (or your self-hosted Blogger blog).
2. Click the Create Sitemap button and this tool will instantly generate the necessary text for your sitemap. Copy the entire generated text to your clipboard (see screenshot below).
3. Next go to your Blogger dashboard and under Settings – > Search Preferences, the enable Custom robots.txt option (available in the Crawling and Indexing section). Paste the clipboard text here and save your changes.

And we are done. Search engines will automatically discover your XML sitemap files via the robots.txt file and you don’t have to ping them manually