How To Submit Your Sitemap To Search Engines

Submitting a sitemap to search engines is another basic search engine optimization that you can implement on your website or blog. Sitemap is a list of pages found in a website made available to crawlers and users. It helps in the search engine optimization of a website by making all pages accessible to search engines. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask; the biggest search engines, are jointly supporting the sitemap protocol so it’s beneficial to create your sitemap and submit it to them. Check my blog’s sitemap to see how a sitemap looks like.

Currently, there are tons of software available to webmasters that help in the creation of an XML compliant sitemap. WordPress users can simply use Google Sitemap XML WordPress plugin or other similar plugins to automate the creation of their sitemaps. Alternatively, those who are not using WordPress can use XML-Sitemap to generate their own XML Sitemap that they can upload to the “public_html/” folder of their sites.

Once you’re done creating your XML Sitemap, the next thing would be to submit it to search engines. We start first with Google.

Submit Sitemap To Google

Google was good enough to introduce Google Webmaster that allows webmasters to submit their sitemaps. Visit Google Webmaster and log-in using your Gmail account. In your dashboard, add your website.

After you have submitted your website, you will be prompted to verify it. Google allows two means of verification. First, which is easier, is to insert a meta tag in your website. Second, you can choose to upload an HTML file to your server. You can do either of the two then click VERIFY once you’re done.

The last step would be for you to submit your sitemap. When all is done, you just have to wait for Google to crawl your sitemap and hopefully include your pages to its indexes.

Submit Sitemap To Yahoo!

Like Google, Yahoo! has it’s own webmaster tools. All you need to do is visit Yahoo! SiteExplorer. Log-in using your Yahoo! account. Inside SiteExplorer, add your website.

Once your website is added, you will be prompted by Yahoo! to verify your ownership of the site. Verification is similar to Google. You can verify your ownership through inserting a meta tag or uploading an HTML file. The later is recommended as it is much easier. When you’re done, click on VERIFY and wait for Yahoo! to crawl and index your website.

Submit Sitemap To Bing

To submit an XML-based Sitemap to Bing:

Copy and paste the entire URL below as a single URL into the address bar of your browser:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

Change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name then press ENTER. You’re done. You just have to wait for Bing to crawl and index your website.

Submit Sitemap To Ask

Once you have a sitemap.xml file in place you can then submit your sitemap into Ask.com This process is very simple:

When you have your sitemap.xml in place you can submit your site to Ask.com by opening up your web browser and typing the following address and ping it:

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

That’s it. There is nothing complicated to it. Create a sitemap and then point your web browser to the special address mention above. This automatically pings Ask.com and submits your sitemap into their database. Done!