Adding a sitemap.xml for SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. I want to improve how my site comes up when people search for it. As usual, I’m relying heavily on this wonderful guide.
Register on Google Search Console
The first thing I did was register my domain on the Google Search Console. That was easy, because I had already purchased the domain from Google Domains. The search console allows us to track our site and improve the search results.
Generate a sitemap
For the search console, we need a sitemap.xml that is just a map of all the URLs in our domain. I noticed the site.xml was in the _site/ folder of my local build, and was updated everytime I ran:
bundle exec jekyll build
That’s the handy command-line way to locally rebuild the website in the _site/ folder when I make changes. However, if I run:
bundle exec jekyll serve
(which first executes a build), then the sitemap.xml appears like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://localhost:4000/backtick-code-color/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-01-03T00:00:00-09:00</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://localhost:4000/deploying-own-domain/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-01-03T00:00:00-09:00</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://localhost:4000/fresh-jekyll/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-01-03T00:00:00-09:00</lastmod>
...
All of the domain is at the base URL of http://localhost:4000/. That’s because Jekyll 3.3 overrides config site.url with url: http://localhost:4000 when running jekyll serve locally in development. If you want to avoid this behavior set JEKYLL_ENV=production to force the environment to production.
Oops! I didn’t want to mess with the JEKYLL_ENV variable, and I wanted to continue making local edits, so rather than this, I just ran a plain:
bundle exec jekyll build
And that gave me a nice _site/sitemap.xml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://bendirt.com/backtick-code-color/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-01-03T00:00:00-09:00</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://bendirt.com/deploying-own-domain/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-01-03T00:00:00-09:00</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://bendirt.com/fresh-jekyll/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-01-03T00:00:00-09:00</lastmod>
...
Submit the sitemap
Now this is what I need to upload to the Google Search Console “Sitemap” at: https://search.google.com/search-console/sitemaps.
But I can’t just upload this, I need to submit a URL….
All that dancing around for nothing. If I visit my deployed website, then an updated sitemap.xml already exists at https://www.bendirt.com/sitemap.xml. I guess this was generated during the github-pages deployment?
Now it’s just about patience with the Google Search Console, since it may take a few days to update with analytics.
