Created a sitemap and verified ownership with Google

I used the Jekyll sitemap plugin to build the sitemap, which was much easier than I thought it would be. A sitemap increases a site’s visibility for search engines:

For use by search engines and other crawlers, there is a structured format, the XML Sitemap, which lists the pages in a site, their relative importance, and how often they are updated. This is pointed to from the robots.txt file and is typically called sitemap.xml.

I also added the relevant .html file to the site to verify that I own the site. In this context, ownership means that I have full admin access to the root folder. It means that Google can give me advanced permissions in Google Console.

Site owners in Search Console have access to sensitive Google Search information about a site. Site owners can also perform actions that can affect a site’s presence and behavior on Google Search and other Google services. Because of this, we want to make sure that only a real site owner is granted owner permissions on Search Console.

This is part of the process of ensuring that the site gets correctly indexed by Google and other search engines.