Increase Web Traffic - Sitemap

Sitemap is a hierarchical visual model of the pages of a Web site. Site webmaster may help readers navigating their website that has more than one page. In SEO, sitemaps will make it easier for search engine spider to crawl their site.


Creating your Sitemap
Some hosting providers provide their own method to create sitemap. For those who did not, webmasters have to create it by visiting xml-sitemps.com. The instruction is there. It’s as easy as ABC. If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines, look at the XML validator (at the site) where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it against the standard.



Submit sitemap to Google
For those who want to submit sitemap at Google, you should visit

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

At first, tell Google all sites you have, and then verify it by injecting some Meta tag on your site homepage. You should check Google Help Page for the full instruction on how to do it.


Submit sitemap to Yahoo
Just like Google, Yahoo! also have their own dedicated service for webmasters at

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

First add your site and click the verification button. Then you can either download a verification key HTML or add some Meta tag to your website. Then you can return to Site Explorer and start telling Yahoo! to start authentication. This should take about 24 hours.


Submit sitemap to Ask
Ask have a simpler solution to the other two to submit sitemap. To submit, simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of your sitemap. Just like this:

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

After that, click Return and you will be inform that Ask have received your sitemap submission.