Getting on search engines can take a lot of time. In the past it could take years to get indexed on Google. Google's theory was that, in the waiting time it would give the site owner the chance to increase the quality and quantity of information on the site! Waiting is now a thing of the past with the introduction of Sitemaps

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a file (XML) that lists all of your website pages including the priority of the page. If your site is changed you can update your sitemap then let the major search engines know that it has been changed, rather than waiting for the next Googlebot to check which could take months.

You would be interested to know that this technology is quite easy to implement yourself!

Step One: Create your Sitemap

There are many free sites (providing you have less than 500 pages to be indexed) that will generate a sitemap for you. The one we will use today is at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ once there follow the four simple steps to generate your new sitemap! After it has been generated simply save it to your computer, upload the file to your web server and move on to step two.

Step Two: Create a Webmaster account with Google, MSN and Yahoo

The major search engines have tools for webmasters to allow them to add sitemaps and notify the search engine if any changes have been made. Below is links to sign up to these search engines as a webmaster.

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

Google, being by far the most popular search engine has some fantastic tools for webmasters, allowing you to submit your sitemap and explore possible issues with site pages. It also has a nifty feature to show you what keywords rank high in Google for your site.

Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Bing (formally MSN) may not be as feature rich as Google in the way of features, but it is still a very popular search engine. We can all use more traffic, right?

Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Yahoo is very similar to Bing's webmaster tools. However in terms of checking what backlinks you have pointing to your site, Yahoo's Site Explorer dominates, picking up many that Google just doesn't display!

Once the account has been activated, simply navigate to the feed or sitemap area and point to where your sitemap is located. E.g. www.mysite.com.au/sitemap.xml

Step Three: Watch your traffic Increase

With more pages indexed, you should notice more visitors coming your way. If not, maybe you need to add a bit more content.

If your site sells a product, try to use selling keywords in your content. E.g. if you are selling laptops, people looking to buy one may not type into Google, "information about laptops" but they may type "laptop prices". By putting yourself in the place of your visitors you will get a much better conversion of visitors to customers and improve your bounce rate. I will explain a bit more on Search engine optimization in a future Hub.

Step Four: Repeat

If your site changes dramatically, repeat the steps. If your site has a few typo's, fix them then repeat. There is nothing worse than submitting your site with typo's and finding out visitors can't find your site due to misspelled keywords.

Sometimes commonly misspelled words can work in your favor, getting traffic that you would not have normally got. This strategy could be used if you have heavy competition for certain keywords, but otherwise should not be used.