Submit site maps to search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their site that may be crawled by the search engines' robots. This Sitemaps are in xml formats.
A typical Sitemap file lists every URL, together with information about when it was last updated, how often it normally changes, and how important it is, relative to other pages in the site. This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl the website.
Creating sitemap
First of all, create the sitemap for your website, listing each url in it.
You may have a look, as an example, at the sitemap of this website that lists the url with other attributes: Easy Tips and Tricks Sitemap
After you have created the sitemap for your website, its the time to submit or inform the search engines about it. Below are the methods to submit to various search engines.
Submitting the sitemap to Google
Google developed a schema for sitemap and has a portal for webmasters Google Webmaster Central.
First of all, after signing into Google accounts, you have to verify the ownership of the website. This is done by uploading an html or updating a page with the meta information that google.com/webmasters provide. The meta tag looks like -
<meta content="unique code provided by google" name="verify-v1" />
Submitting sitemap to MSN
MSN uses Moreover.com for Live search to get informed about the sitmaps for various sites from webmasters. The following URL would directly submit the sitemap to MSN:
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml
Submitting Sitemap to Yahoo
Yahoo provides this service through Yahoo Site Explorer. You can submit the sitemap through the following URL
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
As with Google, Yahoo too provides a verification HTML file or meta tag to verify ownership of the website. Once verified you can use the services provided by Yahoo Site Explorer. Submit the sitemap as a feed by providing your sitemap url on:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Submitting Sitemap to Ask
Ask follows a similar approach. The following URL submits the sitemap to ask.com
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Happy Webmastering!!!
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