How to submit Sitemap to Search Engine ?

Sitemap, the complete index of website is very important for Search Engine Optimization. It provides the search bots with the list of pages in your website.

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

  • Has dynamic content
  • Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX
  • Is new and doesn’t have many links
  • Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.

Now, the question is “How do we SUBMIT sitemap to a search engine ?”.

We will start with Google and cover Yahoo and Bing.

Google:

We can submit Sitemap to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. This enables Google to provide you with useful status and statistical information.

To submit a sitemap to Google, you should have the following websites added and verified in your Webmaster Tools account:

  • the site on which the Sitemap is located
  • the site(s) whose URLs are referenced in the Sitemap
  1. Upload your Sitemap to your site.
  2. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
  3. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.
  4. In the text box, complete the path to your Sitemap (for example, if your Sitemap is at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, type sitemap.xml).
  5. Click Submit Sitemap.

Bing:

  1. Create an XML Sitemap. You can create an XML sitemap by hand, or use an XML sitemaps generator to do it for you.
  2. Login to your Windows Live account and go to Bing Webmaster Center.
  3. Add your site to Bing by filling in your URL and the URL of your sitemap. Click add a site.
  4. Bing will check the sitemap and begin indexing your site as soon as it’s determined that the sitemap has no errors.

Yahoo:

Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and log in with your Yahoo name and password (same as your Yahoo email if you have one).

Once you log in, you’ll see two choices:
1) Submit a Website or a Webpage.
2) Submit a Site Feed.

Click on Submit a Site Feed. You first need to upload your .xml file to your website’s home directory.

I hope you find this information useful.