SiteMaps

Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well.

Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you.

Once you’ve got your file written, you’ve got to tell Google that it’s there, so you can get Googlebot to come out and spider your website as soon as possible. Without doing this, you have no control at all when your website will be first indexed.

Where do you do this? Simply log into your Google account, (the same account for Gmail, Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, or any other of Google’s services) and click on “My Account,” then “Webmaster Tools.” From that page you’ll be able to add websites and watch their progress.

Yahoo!’s Sitemap is different. It’s just a Text file (.TXT) that is nothing but a list of URLs on your domain. If you list an URL there, it will index that page. If not, it won’t. I love the simplicity of their method. They call it a “Feed” however, and you have to submit that too.

Simply go to the main page of Yahoo.com, click at the bottom where it says “Suggest a Site.” Choose the top option of “Suggest a Site for free,” and the page will then take you to an account login screen if you’re not already logged in. Do so, and then the next screen will be a website URL suggestion form. The account “Feed” it is looking for is the Urllist.txt file that you have to make. It can be added

there at the end of the URL to your website in their form, and Yahoo! will start spidering your site immediately as well.

So where do you get your Sitemap.xml and Urllist.txt files made? There are hundreds of places online that offer the service of writing these files for you. Until recently, all the free versions were very limited, only allowing 50 to100 links on your site, or not allowing certain time variables. Lately there’s been an addition that has no such limits, making all the rest of these obsolete:

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

Click on the ‘webmaster tool’ box on this page and it will open up a Java application. (Yes, you need free Sun Java installed first.) Play with this app until you feel like you’ve included everything on your site that you want Google and Yahoo! to see, and hidden away everything else. It can then output the sitemap.xml and urllist.txt files for you, all for free.

Upload those to the main folder of your server host and tell Big G and Y! where they are as fast as you can.

All the rest of SEOing your website has to do with link building, but there are some other details that can help as well. I also recommend a great program called WebCEO that helps automate all of this work from one suite of tools, and they even have a free version as well. It even gives you reports of work left to do and campaign effectiveness.