What Are Sitemaps And How Sitemaps Are Useful To You

What Are Sitemaps?
According to Wikipedia- “A site map (or sitemap) is a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.” While end users can use sitemaps as well, the key use has become to help have your websites indexed by search engines. Most sitemaps are a standard .xml file located in the base directory of your site. In example this is my sitemap.

How Sitemaps Are Useful To You?
The most important roll Sitemaps play these days is the ability for them to improve search engine optimization. It is a simple step that is easily overlooked by many as sitemaps allow each of your pages to be discovered by the major search engines. While for sites starting out this isn’t that big of a deal- as your site grows larger search engines will only follow a set number of links from each page and this will allow you to easily have all of the pages on your site submitted to be indexed.

How To Submit Sitemaps To Google
To submit your site to Google you must first create a Webmaster account. Once your account is created you must let Google know that you actually own your site by either adding a line of code to your site or upload a generic .html file. Both of these methods are fully covered while creating your account. Once you have verified with Google that you own the site(s) listed you are able to submit your sitemap which will take a few days for Google to fully analyze and accept.

How To Submit Sitemaps To MSN
MSN does not appear to currently have an easy way to submit your sitemaps to their index. There is a way to “trick” it into accepting your sitemap however. MSN will take indexes pinged by Moreover so if you change the following string to reflect your domain and sitemap it will allow it through:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml

How To Submit Sitemaps To Yahoo
To submit to Google you must first login to Site Explorer with your Yahoo credentials. Once you are logged in you are able to add a site as yours and much like Google can upload a verification html file. After 24 hours your site will be added and you can submit your sitemap by using the manage button and inputting your sitemap as a feed.

How To Submit Sitemaps To Ask
Much like submitting your site to MSN you may add your sitemap by pinging it through ask.com. However, unlike MSN you are provided directly by ASK with a service that will ping the sitemap for you. Simply head over to:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

with your domain information and sitemap name listed instead of the generic ones and you’ll quickly be added in!

How To Submit Sitemaps with robots.txt
In April of 2007 all 4 of the major players that take sitemaps to index your pages have added an easy way for your sitemap to be recognized. This is great if the search engines come across your website, the only downside would be if there are no incoming links to your site as that would lead to the search engines not finding your robots.txt file.

The format for this would be:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

You are also able to add a Disallow line at the end to ignore certain directories. Say you had a /test directory that was referenced somewhere but did not want that shown on the search engines you could add a line like the following to have it ignored.
Disallow: /test/