If you have a blog, you probably want people to read it and for them to be able to read it, they first have to discover it. Though people may learn about your blog from a variety of sources such as by direct communication with you, through social media or links from other sites, search engines such as Google usually play the leading role of having your blog discovered.
For your blog to be listed in search results of a search engine, it has to be indexed by that search engine. For this purpose, search engines use automated software, called web crawlers, that visit pages and index them as they become available. Though your blog may be discovered by crawlers and indexed by search engines automatically after some period of time, there are certain things you can do to speed up this process. Submitting your sitemap manually to search engines is one of them. This will let the search engines know about the structure of your blog, which enables them to efficiently index all your pages. According to Google, "Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process".
In this article, we will learn how to submit sitemaps of our blogs to Google.