A Simple Guide to XML Sitemap Submission

You have spent hours or days designing your site, or have it done professionally at a hefty cost by an expert web designer. You have then invested heavily to craft unique content and you cannot just wait to deliver your content to the world and share your experiences, products, services, or whatever information you have in mind. Days fly by and you don’t receive visitors to your website-days may translate into months, and you are almost giving up.  You are wondering what might be wrong, the answer is simple; you site or content has not been indexed.

It can be discouraging to realize that your pages haven’t been indexed by the search engines. Such delays only mean one thing; you are losing out on business to competitors. But there is a solution, you can now speed up the indexing process and improve your visitor’s experience by creating a sitemap. It is simple because you can now use any of the available sitemap maker like Dynomapper, a reliable website mapping tool that does the difficult work for you, fast and free from flaws.

What is a Sitemap?

An sitemap is simply a page containing links to different pages of your website that can be used by search engines as well as website visitors to find information contained on the site fast. Simply put, it is a list of pages on your site. It serves as some kind of a table of content to your website. When you create a sitemap and submit it to the search engines like Google, the search engines will follow the provided paths to find required information, and ensures that the content is indexed as expected. Sitemaps are mostly and highly recommended in the following cases;

• Websites with lots of dynamic content
• Web pages that cannot be discovered with ease by Googlebots like those with Flash or AJAX.
• New websites with few links
• Sites with content-rich pages that are not properly linked or not linked whatsoever.

Sitemaps can also be used to avail additional data about your web pages to Google.  This information is very important and can be used to help you improve on various aspects of the website, ensuring a better user experience and proper indexing.

• The last time every page was modified
• Frequency of various site changes.
• Every page’s relative importance due to ability to assign priority figures from 0 to 1.

The extra information the search engines pick from your site complements the data collected during normal website crawling. This automatically places sites with Sitemaps ahead of those without. However, note that by simply using a sitemap maker to create sitemap doesn’t guarantee inclusion into Google index but there are no penalties for sitemap submissions.

Finally, ensure that the Sitemap is up-to-date all the time lest some content is left out from the indexes. Even though some webmasters, especially those managing multiple content-rich websites might find the process of generating sitemaps tedious, the outcome is worth every second you spend working on it. Read this step by step guide on how to submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.