XML Sitemaps, Creating and Pinging (Submitting) to Search Engines

XML sitemaps are a proven way of ensuring your website and all its
pages are recognized by search engines, creating and submitting or
pinging your sitemap to these engines (Google, Yahoo MSN/Live) can
often be easier said than done.

To begin with who knows how to write XML (eXtensible Markup Language)? Secondly what do you do once this sitemap has been created… this post will hopefully shed some light on what it’s all about and how you can use it.

Create the XML Sitemap

Making your xml sitemap is very straight forward, though simple, there is no need to get your head around the syntax used in this language (that said if you’re really into it I suggest you check out the Wikipedia post about XML). There’s a variety of XML sitemap generator tools available both free and paid.

If your website has less than 200 internal links then this sitemap tool will do the job for you. If on the other hand you have a bigger website then I suggest you check this tool out.
Trellian SEOTool Kit comes complete with everything you need to optimize your WebPages including a XML sitemap generator, you will have to hand over some of your hard earned dollars but I guarantee it’s worth it!

Both these tools output the same type of XML file – which is exactly as it says, a file with the extension .xml that contains links to all the pages within your website. Ever opened one? This is what they look like:

Submit the XML Sitemap

Once you have your xml sitemap you now need to do something with it, follow these simple steps and prepare to be indexed.

1. Upload the file to your website. Keeping it simple I suggest uploading the file to the root of the website where you find all your web pages thus the URL to the sitemap would look like http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

2. Once uploaded you then need to “ping” the search engines, telling them that your sitemap exists and they need to read it.

Submitting the xml sitemap URL to the search engines is also a very simple process. It’s as simple as pasting a URL into your browser and hitting enter.

Google:

http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Yahoo:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

MSN/Live:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Ask:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Finally, creating, uploading and pinging or submitting your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live) does not guarantee your site will achieve higher rankings, it simply means the time for your site to be indexed will be dramatically decreased, this combined with further search engine submissions to smaller engines is a great head start to driving traffic to your site.