A Guide how to

   BEFORE I get in to the topic of Submitting your site map to Google, MSN, Yahoo, or even Ask, I want to answer a question I get very often.

Q: Will, Do I have to make different site maps for each search engine?

NO! In November 2006, according to MSN Blog announcement, the 3 major search engines Google, MSN and Yahoo all agreed to the same sitemap.xml protocol as described at http://www.sitemaps.org/. As long as webmasters follow the protocol, they can ensure their sites are fully and consistently indexed across all the major search engines. This article is important for all those with missing or poorly ranked pages. Read the full article.

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Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! Unite to Support Sitemaps

Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! Unite to Support Sitemaps

Source:Wednesday, November 15, 2006 7:06 PM by msnsearch

   Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol. The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world. This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it.

   So, why are we excited to work on this? Because by agreeing on a standard, we can provide site owners with one simple way to share information with every search engine. You just publish a sitemap, and every engine is instantly able to read and use the data to more effectively index your site. Since this is a free, widely supported protocol, our hope is that this will foster an even broader community of developers building support for it.

   We are 100% behind this protocol - this kind of collaboration will help improve the search experience for all of our customers, and we are working hard to release full support in 2007. We are starting to alpha test with internal partners such as MSDN and Microsoft Support now. Like all teams at Microsoft, we like to dog food our work internally to ensure that it is working properly before it is publicly released. Watch this space for an update as soon as we’re done.

   Interested in the gritty details? Read more about the Sitemaps protocol at the official website: http://www.sitemaps.org. If you have any comments, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Ken Moss
General Manager, Live Search

Back to Submitting your sitemap.xml to Ask, Google, MSN & Yahoo

There are two main methods to submit your site map

• Direct ping
• Search engine tool
• of course you can always pay to submit it or use a service or application either on the web or desktop, but this is beyond the scope of this article

Direct Ping

   Direct pings are nice as they are quick and efficient in getting your site map to the search engine. They allow you to simply use a url string to send to the search engine the location of your domains sitemap.xml file.

Ask (Ask Jeeves): http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitema...

Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomai...

MSN: http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.yourdom...

Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?ap...

Others -
Moreover: http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml (used more for news type websites)

   Pretty simple method right? Well that is a great way of just getting the bots to come to your site, but today's search engines like to be enticed. (see below)

Search Engine Tool

   Search engines are lured to your site because of the analytic tools or verification tools placed there by you or your web admin. These tools or verification objects work as a way to validate your site with the search engine and get them to return more often (of course there are more tricks to do this as well, but again, beyond the scope of this article).

   So lets take a look at these tools, we'll start with the most famous one, Google Analytics.

   Google Analytics is a web application and verification tool used by Google to authenticate you own the domain or at least have access to it as a webmaster. I won't go in to how to install it or how to use it here, but you can find all that information on http://www.google.com/analytics/. The quick and the dirty of why this is important is that it allows each of your webpages to send information to the Google servers when they are accessed. This information is then compiled for you in easy to use graphs and menus to let you KNOW who is looking at what parts of your site. The simple act of installing the little bit of code on each of your webpages will have the bots looking through your site quickly and they will find your 'sitemap.xml' file in short order. The bonus to this is the ability to watch multiple sites at once.

   Google also has another tool and this is the one that you use to submit your 'sitemap.xml' file to Goolgle. It is called http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools. This tool is very useful in that you can see quite simply which keywords are being used by Internet users to find your site in addition to submitting your 'sitemap.xml' file.

   Yahoo! It is said that if you wish to do business on the web in the form of eCom, you need to get listed with Yahoo! It is by far the oldest of the search engines and still a very strong competitor among them. You will want to go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and get an account. From there you can submit all your sitemaps for all of your sites, get the verification code to place on each page of your site and explore what Yahoo! knows about your site and it's links.

   MSN or MSNLive has been revamped a few times, but in all honesty, if you are a new Internet Explorer 7 or especially IE 8 user you are thrilled of the enhancements and just how fast this search engine works. Microsoft is a major marketer, so don't exclude this one from your 'sitemap.xml' site submissions, you'll regret it. You can start by getting an account with Microsoft and if you don't have one, now is the time to get one with this link to use their tools, http://webmaster.live.com/. Very similar and basic as Google's webmaster tools or Yahoo! site explorer, you can add multiple sites and add your site maps here. Again there is a domain verifier and a basic keyword research tool.

   ASK (Ask Jeeves), currently ASK only uses the ping submission method from above.

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Building the 'sitemap.xml' file

   That was just some simple ways of getting your site noticed by the search engines. Of course you maybe asking now, how do I build a 'sitemap.xml' file and/or how do I know my 'sitemap.xml' file is valid. Well I am glad you asked.

   There are many web tools and desktop tools to get your first 'sitemap.xml' file built. I'll go through just a couple that I have used and I recommend to newbies because they are simple to use.

Where to get the tool	About the tool
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/	Very simple to use online tool supporting up to 500 pages FREE online
http://www.sitemaps-builder.com/	Again, simple to use and will index up to 1000 pages FREE online
http://www.coffeecup.com/google-sitemapper/	A very easy to use desktop application for only $29.00. It is nice to store your sitemap on your desktop and edit it whenever you would like. Videos on how to use it.
http://gsitecrawler.com/	Desktop application and FREE! You can change the priority and frequency quite easily per page.
http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/	FREE desktop tool
http://www.intelli-mapper.com/	$24.95 Desktop application

   The problem with the online tools and even some desktop tools is that you can not give the priority or various other options when building the 'sitemap.xml' file. It is therefore extremely important that you edit the file using wordpad or some text only editor to alter it a bit. Keep in mind when altering your 'sitemap.xml' the order in which the links appear is not important to the search engine. You can tell the search engine your preference by using the
tag, which you should become very familiar with. The two resources for this are http://webdesign.about.com/od/sitemaps/a/aa010807.htm and of course the standard at it's home of http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php. Don't be afraid to read this page, it's easy to understand.

Validating the 'sitemap.xml' file

   If you have been able to understand all of the above so far you are ahead of the curve for doing business on the web in comparison to your competition's web site, unless they hired a marketing team, in which case you get what you pay for, there are a lot of 'web marketing companies' that are on this SEO gravy train right now.

   Anyway, once you have your 'sitemap.xml' file constructed the way you want it, you will need to have it validated. The reason for validation is to prevent looking at your Google, MSN or Yahoo account and noticing 'sitemap errors'. You are able to build more credibility by submitting a sitemap with no errors. (btw for fun, see if you can locate your competitions 'sitemap.xml' file and run it through the validator, you might be surprised that either they don't have the file or it contains errors).

The BEST site to use is http://www.validome.org/google/validate. Why, because I said so...actually it shows you where the error is in your file and tries to explain why it is an error.