Tips to Submit Sitemap/site to Google, Yahoo and Msn

Submitting sitemap to major search engines is an important and effective way to get indexed all of web pages quickly. Often webmaster has two types of sitemaps- HTML sitemap and XML sitemap.

HTML Sitemap is for user benefit and not for to submit it to search engines. Having an html sitemap on a site makes it easy to access to its users as if a user looking for any page of your website then he can click on sitemap to get all links for internal web pages.

XML sitemap is for Search engines it helps search engine spider to crawl all the URLs more frequently at the same place because it provides more information to search engine spider. An XML sitemap includes list of all URLs of a site with information like when it was updated, how much time it usually takes to have some change, what is the importance of a particular page in comparison to others.

Creating an XML Sitemap:

Creating an error free sitemap is also so important because if you have even a little error it may cause of indexing problems. So if your hosting providers provide utilities to create your sitemap then its good and if not then also no need to worry as some free or paid tools are also available on the web.

For creating XML sitemap you can use xml-sitemaps.com. It is really a better option to create XML sitemap to a website. It is so easy to just go to site and enter your site URL into the generator box you also have options to change frequency, last modification date and priority and then click on start. In a few minutes, XML sitemap will generate. Just copy-and-paste the resulting sitemap into notepad, save it and upload to your site with the file name: sitemap.xml

If you want to validate the XML prior uploading to the search engines look at the XML validator where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it according to the standard.

Submitting sitemap to Google:

Google originally developed the XML schema which defines the structure of an XML document for sitemaps. You can submit your XML sitemap to Google through Google webmaster tools at by creating an account at-

www.google.com/webmasters/tools

To submit a sitemap to Google you also have to prove that you are the owner of the particular website. The verification is achieved by adding a meta tag between the head tags on your site homepage.

Submitting site/sitemap to Yahoo:

Submitting sitemap to Yahoo is not very different from submitting a sitemap to Google. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a dedicated service for webmasters from Yahoo. First you need to create a yahoo account to submit a site/sitemap to yahoo then go to-

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

and submit your website URL and click to "add my site" button. After that click on verification button then you get an option to download a verification key html file which you will need to upload to root directory of your web server.

You can then download a verification key html file - which you will need to upload to the root directory of your web server. After uploading verification key, come back to Site Explorer and click to start authentication. Verification process may take up to 24 hours. Here you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Submit site to MSN:

Like yahoo you need not to have an msn account to submit your site you can submit your site URL to MSN just by going to-

http://search.msn.com.my/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSUT

MSN do not support direct submission of sitemap, they do suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your robots.txt file.

For example:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
This would tell MSN and also to other search engines to crawl your sitemap file but not to crawl your cgi-bin directory.

Above information will sure help you in creating and submitting your sitemap to major search engines. If you have any comments or queries feel free to send it to me.