Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all the rage with webmasters, bloggers and small businesses. The whole idea is to get your web site listed on the top one to three pages of a search engine’s results when your potential customers search on specific keywords. This is something I have been developing experience with over the past few years with mixed results. The fact is no one can guarantee you a high page ranking in search results. Nevertheless, there are a number of things you can do to give your self the best chances.

The first and most important thing you need to do - submitting your site to major search engines - is the focus of today’s post. The reason this is so important - if it’s not already obvious - is simple. Your site can’t be on the first few result pages of search, if your site is not even listed in the search engine’s index. There are services that can do this for you, however, it is something that you can do yourself pretty easily.

Create a Site Map

In the old days of the Internet we used to submit our sites to search engines by simply going to the search engines site and telling them where our site’s home page was. Sometime later, if you were lucky, the search engines crawler or “bot” would scan your site and add it to their index. Today there is a new way evolving that gives you more control over how the search engine sees your site. That method is using a Site Map or Site Feed.

Site maps are an easy way to inform search engines about all of the pages on your site. I’m not talking about your site’s sitemap page that provides your visitor with links to your various pages. I am talking about an XML file that is used exclusively by the search engines. This file lists the URL’s along with additional information such as it’s update frequency, last change and relative importance of the page. The site map gives search engines the ability to crawl and index your site more intelligently. It does not guarantee that your pages will be indexed by the search engine, however, it does make sure that the search engine knows about the pages you want indexed.

Creating a Site Map is a relatively simple process. It can be done with any text editor, or, if you are familiar with MS XML Notepad, you can use it. The protocol, or layout, used for a site map file has been sponsored by a partnership between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and is documented at the Sitemaps Web Page, http://www.sitemap.org. There you will find more details for the protocol’s specification. There are tools that will generate the sitemap for you automatically, but I found many of them lacking and not dependable. If may be a good way to create the initial version, but if you have the patience, it will be more accurate if you edit and maintain it yourself.

Here is an example snippet of code from the sitemap.xml file here at GARA Systems.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.gara.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority></em>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.gara.com/about</loc>
<lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority></em>
</url>
</urlset>

There are some free tools out there for validating the sitemap, however, I found that it’s easiest to just submit the sitemap to Google (see below). If there is a problem with your file the Google Webmaster Tools will let you know.

TIP - If you use a WordPress blog check out the Google Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It’s a plugin that updates your site map every time you post.

Uploading Your Site Map

You should place the sitemap in the root directory of your site. If you have more than one sitemap, you can place each in the folder it maps or keep them in the root and use different filenames.

Feed Your Site Map To Major Search Engines

Now that your sitemap is up it’s time to tell the world where it is. Once way to let search engines know about your sitemap is by placing the following line - using your sitemap, of course - in your ROBOTS.TXT file.

Sitemap: http://www.gara.com/sitemap.xml

The next time the search engine crawls your site, it should see this entry and make use of your new site map. But don’t depend on it. It is better to do an explicit submission with each of the major search engines.

Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap to Google. This will also submit your site to AOL as their listings come from Google’s index.

Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to submit your sitemap to Yahoo!. The Yahoo! tool let’s you submit your home page or a Site Feed. You want to select the Site Feed option to submit your sitemap.xml file. Submitting to Yahoo! will also submit your site to the AllTheWeb.com search engine that is now part of the Yahoo!.

Use MSN Live Search URL Submission to submit your sitemap to Microsoft. This tool appears to only accept your homepage, however, you can submit the URL of your Site Feed as well.

Submitting your site to Ask is a bit different. To do so you must use a ping URL that passes your sitemap as part of the query string. Here is an example:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.gara.com/sitemap.xml

To use this link, replace the URI that identifies the GARA Systems sitemap.xml file with one that identifies the one for your site. Then just paste the full link into your browser’s address bar. You will be taken to a confirmation page notifying you the sitemap has been submitted.

Conclusion

Well, that’s about it. Now the three most popular search engines will know about every page of your site. You should keep your Site Feed fresh by adding the URL’s of new pages, removing dead links and updating the lastmod attribute anytime you change a page. You shouldn’t need to resubmit the feed to the search engines as they should scan them regularly now that they know about it, but it won’t hurt if you do.

Of course there is much more to search engine optimization then this initial task, but it is essential, nevertheless. In future posts I will talk about some of the other simple and effective things you can do to improve your site’s page rankings. Stay tuned!!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 10:55 am and is filed under How To, Web Admin, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.