Sitemaps for SEO Optimisation

Instead of waiting for search engines to auto discover your website, you can submit a sitemap to assist search engines in crawling your website.

This blog is created with hugo which can be set up to configure a root /sitemap.xml automatically in the case of this blog, that is located at https://phteven.space/sitemap.xml. This sitemap contains a list of urls with a last modified date.

<urlset>
 <url>
  <loc>
   https://phteven.space/posts/2026/03/terraform-github-aws/azure-oidc-authentication/
  </loc>
  <lastmod>2026-03-01T00:00:00+00:00</lastmod>
 </url>
</urlset>

If your goal is to improve your SEO by makign it easier for common English-speaking search engines to find your website then you will probably want to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.

[!TIP] Bing is used behind the scenes for Yahoo search I’ve read that DuckDuckGo uses Bing for sitemaps but have been unable to verify it

Submit sitemap to Google

Because I registered my domain through NameCheap, I chose Domain based authentication.

Verification for me was just adding a TXT record.

➜ dig +short TXT phteven.space
"google-site-verification={VERIFICATION_CODE_HERE}"

Submit your sitemap url, and with under 10 minutes of waiting, Google had parsed my sitemap.

Submit sitemap to Bing

I ended up importing straight from Google so I didn’t need to do any extra validations or setup

After about 10 minutes it had parsed my sitemap

Conclusion

Your site should now be indexed faster and you’ll have crawl analytics in both consoles.