A sitemap for your website is possibly one of the most important things you can add to your site to help with Search Engine Optimization, and getting the maximum number of pages indexed to improve search engine traffic.
If you use Serendipity, Wordpress, Joomla, or any of the popular CMS systems then you probably know that you can install a plugin that creates sitemaps in at least one format that the search engines spiders will read.
The problem is that most only submit your sitemap to Google, which is great, and of course they have the largest market share, but there are other search engines, and some of them will often provide different traffic that you may never get from Google.
Here's why; Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com all index a site differently, for example Yahoo tend to like pages that are quite topical, on this blog I get more traffic about Italian phrases from Yahoo than I ever get from Google, yet hardly ever get SEO traffic from Yahoo which tends to be one of my biggest keywords from Google.
It is worthwhile getting your site indexed by the smaller search engines, I'd even go so far as to say that some of that traffic might convert better, so without further ado, here are the urls you need to use to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
To use any of these URLs, simply add the full URL of your sitemap file after the = sign.
Submitting sitemaps to major search engines
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Submitting sitemaps to major search engines
Thursday, November 20. 2008
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in SEO, Traffic
Comments (5)
Defined tags for this entry: Google
, MSN and Ask with these handy urls
, Submit your sitemap to the major search engines
, MSN and Ask with these handy urls, Submit your sitemap to the major search enginesFriends
Project Cost Control Software said,
Friday, November 21. 2008 at 13:13 (Reply)
AmeriGlide said,
Friday, November 21. 2008 at 21:45 (Reply)
I agree with you about some of the other traffic converting better. In my experience I have found this to be true.
Bijou Argent Tibetain said,
Sunday, November 23. 2008 at 10:28 (Reply)
AmeriGlide said,
Monday, November 24. 2008 at 15:23 (Reply)
A robot.txt file tells the bot what pages it can visit and what pages it should stay away from. This way if you have a section of the site you don't want indexed, you can tell the bot not to visit this part of your site.
Good bots will read the robot.txt file, but not all bots will. This can be important with a wordpress site, so you can avoid dupe content and make sure the bots only index your posts, instead of indexing your tag pages.
I would suggest doing some reading on it. They are very simple and there is lots of information out there.
Axekap consulting said,
Monday, December 15. 2008 at 19:16 (Reply)
"Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml"
is one (good) way of doing it ...and now understood by all search engines.