Get Found through XML Sitemap Submission

XML Sitemap Submission is an effective way to make sure that all your web pages are properly indexed by the search engine spiders. Sitemaps have been an important part of search engine optimization strategies for quite a long time and they still have a role to play in the race for higher search engine rankings. The thing is that however hard you try to optimize your website your efforts won’t have effect until search engines take notice of the updates you’ve done to your web pages. By creating a sitemap and submitting it to the major search engines you can ensure timely indexing.

What is a Sitemap and Why do You Need It

A sitemap is a file (usually in XML format) containing a list of all URLs of a website together with some additional information on each of the URLs such as frequency of updates, the last modification date, etc. By creating and submitting a sitemap you inform search engine spiders about the web pages that you wish to be indexed. XML sitemap submission won’t give you a boost in search engine rankings right away, but it has an indirect influence on the way your website ranks in search engine listings. XML sitemap submission is important for SEO because it ensures total and proper indexing of all the web pages of a website providing for better exposure in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

How to Submit a Sitemap to the Search Engines 

XML sitemap submission used to be a pretty time consuming thing to do. You had to submit everything manually spending your precious time to file the sitemaps to the search engines. Another challenge was that every search engine used to employ its own sitemap format, so that you had to create a sitemap for Google, another one for Yahoo, still another one for MSN and so on. The good news is that the evolution in the world of search have provided for a better way of sitemap submission. Today you can use the sitemap auto discovery protocol to submit your sitemap to search engines in virtually no time and without much hassle. All you need to do is add your sitemap to the robot.txt file. Basically a robot.txt is a guideline for search engine spiders that tells them what pages to crawl and which parts of a website should be excluded from search results. When search engine crawlers arrive at a website the first thing they do is search for a robot.txt protocol. If you include your sitemap into the robot.txt file it will be automatically submitted to the search engines by their spiders. Automatic sitemap discovery through robot.txt has made XML sitemap submission much easier, but you need to make sure that there's no index errors in the code so that the sitemap is properly read.