An XML Sitemap is very important for you to get traffic to your website for a few reasons and you can create one for FREE and I will show you how. There are many SEO companies out there that offer this service for hundreds of dollars or you can get software that will do it for you, but it is so simple to do on your own.
Your goal is to be at the top of the Google search results when your keywords are typed into the search engine and you need a XML Sitemap to do it.
First why do you need a XML sitemap?
Let search engines find you - This is the biggest reason, search engines need to find you in order to get more traffic. Oh they can find you eventually after months of being online but your goal is NOT to have visitors to your website months from now...is it? NO!
You need to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google right away once your site is completely finished and published online. When you submit the site map your telling Google "Hey come visit me and index all my pages in your search engine so people can find me when they search for my keywords". Once submitted Google sends a "Google Bot" out to scan your website of all it's content, then it takes that information back and indexes it so people can find you. So it is very important to have a good design SEO so you can rank well at google. If you rank well with Google then other search engines will find you too.
Let's you define how often your website is updated - You want to let search engines know you updated your website with new content so you'll need to create and resubmit your XML Sitemap again and again. You should be adding new content to your website at least once every two weeks or weekly if you can, the bigger the sitemap the more important Google thinks you are and ranks you well. Also the more often you resubmit the more fresh content there is for Google to display for people searching.
You can set priority for your pages - You can determine which pages are more important then other so google puts more priority on these pages. Example: your home page is more important then you contact us page.
Create an XML Sitemap
This is very easy to do, just follow these simple steps,
Go to XML-SiteMap.com and enter you URL (Web Address) Example: http//:www.yourwebsite.com.
Change the frequency from the drop down menu to whatever your submission rate is going to be.
From the Priority drop down menu select "automatic". Google likes the priority being set.
Hit start and wait for it to finish.
Once complete you want to click on the first selection that ends with "sitemap.xml".
You now have the option to save it. Save it in folder named after your website as this will prevent mixing it up with other websites sitemaps you might have.
Submit your site map to Google.
Submitting Your XML Sitemap To Search Engines
Submit a XML Sitemap to MSN
MSN have yet to implement a formal interface for Sitemap submission (as at
July 2007). To monitor the situation, please visit (from time to time) the MSN
Official Livesearch Blog (where future announcements are likely to be found).
While MSN have yet to implement a front door, there is a recognised back
door for submitting your sitemap to the MSN Search index; namely moreover.com!
You should use the following syntax directly in your browser URL box:
Since February 2005, moreover.com have been the official provider of RSS
feeds to the my MSN portal (see press release) and reliable evidence suggests
that submission to Moreover will result in MSN spidering your pages within 2-3
weeks.
Note that, whilst MSN still do not support direct submission, they do
suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your
robots.txt file (something now supported by sitemaps.org). For example:
This would tell MSN (and all other engines) to crawl your sitemap file but
not to crawl your cgi-bin directory. For more info on how to implement a
robots.txt file (in the root of your site webserver) please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org
Submit a XML Sitemap to Google
Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a
dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:
google.com/webmasters/
First, you need to tell Google all the sites you own, then verify that you
indeed own them. The verification is achieved by adding a meta tag between the
head tags on your site homepage. The syntax for the tag is as follows:
Submit a XML Sitemap to Yahoo
Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated
service for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your
ownership of the site. First go to:
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a
verification key html file - which you will need to upload to the root directory
of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start
authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also
add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the XML Sitemap
as a feed.
Submit XML Sitemap to Ask
Ask follows a simpler approach to the other three. To submit you sitemap,
you simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of where your sitemap is
located:
XML Sitemap
Why You Need An XML Site Map
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