Seo Basics Part 2

How to create Sitemap.xml and running site submissions

Get search engines to index every word you publish!

OK… So you’ve read SEO Basics — Part 1 , and you have added the meta-tags to every page on your site. Great! So what’s next? Well, how ’bout getting the search engines to index every page on your site? How you say?? — The answer is to make a little road map for search engines to find all the pages of your site. Honestly, don’t expect all search engines to even attempt this.

As mentioned in before, many search engines are just paid Internet ‘phone books.’ The idea being that your index rank is based on how much money you pay them. Of course, most Internet users out there know who these companies are by now, and are avoiding using them more and more. It’s important to note however, that advertising with these search engines may not be a bad idea. Specially if you find that a large segment of your audience are users, or members of these services. At first this might be an educated guess, but later you will quantify who your users are, and where they are coming from with statistical data. More on statistics later.

The sitemap.xml file and what it does…

Why wouldn’t a search engine just spyder your entire site? Well the reason is time and bandwidth. These search engines have to index millions of new sites everyday. Following all the links buried all over a typical website would just take years to do. Especially because developers may call the pages they create, anything they like. One company might title your “About Us” page ‘about.aspx,’ while another might use a numeric value like ‘2_1.html’ instead. That’s why search engines, and organizations like the good folks at sitemap.org have attempted to create a standardized method for ‘mapping’ your site for search engine indexing. This map is an XML document that tells the search engines some key information about the pages on your site. Basically, where these pages located, when they were last modified, the frequency of modifications and the priority of the pages in relation to your site.

It is a really good idea to have a sitemap.xml uploaded with your other site files before submitting your site to search engines. This is because sometimes it takes a while to get those search engine spyders to come across your site and you want to connect to your audience as fast as you can so that you can start seeing some ROI on your website. You can create this file using a simple notepad editor with rich formatting turned off.

Below is a sample entry on a sitemap.xml file (use all values within <url> and </url> for every page you plan to index):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
      <loc>http://www.somesite.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2009-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.5</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

Need an easy way to do this? I thought so… The good people at XML-Sitemaps.com have made a terrific tool to help you generate a sitemap automatically.

Now that you have everything in place you can start submitting your site URL to different search engines! There are many helpful services out there that will help you submit to multiple sites at once, but I always visit all the major search engines, one by one, and find the “Submit a Site” link. One of the reason for this is that sites services like Google have many optimization types. Business listings for Google Maps™ being just one example. You can even submit a logo and photo of your business while you are at it! The thing is, you never really know how a person will intuit themselves to your site. Every time you visit these sites, there is a good chance that you’ll learn something new. This is an ongoing process and only begins with your initial submission.

To learn more visit Sitemaps.org

Next in SEO Basics — Part 3 , we’ll find out why content is everything in SEO
SEO Basics by Joseph Steck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.