Creating a sitemap of your OpenCart store allows Google and other search engines to crawl more intelligently through the pages of your website. In case your site is linked properly, a map would increase the discoverability of the content of your store. This is why OpenCart has a special feature that makes the whole process of creating a Google sitemap a lot easier and this step-by-step tutorial will guide you through it.
Here is how to do it:
- Login to the Admin panel of your OpenCart store and open the Extensions -> Feeds menu. Install Google Sitemap and enter the Edit Google Sitemap menu. Change the status of the sitemap to enabled and copy the Data Feed URL.
- Go to Google Webmaster Tools at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools .
- In order to use the Google Webmaster Tools, your website should be registered with your account. To do this, sign in to the Google Search Console, click the ‘Add a site’ button and follow the instructions to claim your ownership of the website.
- Proceed to Crawl->Sitemap menu. This is the menu where you can see the sitemaps of your websites.
- To add a new one select the ‘Add/Test Sitemap’ button and paste the Data Feed URL, you have copied from OpenCart. Remember to modify the pasted URL, leaving only the path to the sitemap page and removing the domain, as it is already predefined by Google.
- Click ‘Submit map’ and the process is finished. You can see if the sitemap is correctly created or check if there are any error messages after you refresh the Crawl->Sitemap page
Congratulations, you have now setup a sitemap for your e-commerce website! A well linked website with a good sitemap would be easier to discover for search engines and this will almost certainly attract new customers to your store.
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