Tell Search Engines About Your XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a simple way to “spoon feed” your page locations and other info (like page importance, update period, etc.) to the search engines. Through the recently-adopted Sitemaps.org XML sitemap standard, one file can serve the top 4 search engines. Most webmasters know about Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! SiteExplorer, but those XML sitemap submission methods are cumbersome. Here’s the short way to tell search engines about your XML sitemap:

Ask.com:

Google:

Yahoo!:

Live.com/MSN.com is still the odd man out. To submit your sitemap to them, (as per Livesearch.spaces.live.com): modify robots.txt to include a line for Sitemap: <sitemap_location> where <sitemap_location>; is the complete URL of your Sitemap Index File (or your sitemap file, if you don’t have an index file).

My advice, use www.xml-sitemaps.com to create your sitemap, upload it to your root directory and use the methods above to submit!

[tags]XML sitemap, sitemaps[/tags]

Written by jclayc on October 14th, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Coding Topics and General SEO Discussion and SEO for Law Firms.