This is the last post of the sitemap submission series. We are already through Google and Yahoo and now it’s Live.com (or MSN). The process is pretty much similar. If you have submitted your site’s sitemap to Google or Yahoo or both, you must have created the file sitemap.xml and it’s still there in the root directory of your site.

Before you do anything else just go to Live.com Webmaster Center and log in using your Live Mail or Hotmail Account and hit the ‘Add a site’ button.

When the page loads completely provide information like your web site’s url and the url or location of the site’s sitemap.xml. Please note here that this is not the regular site-map (generally sitemap.html) you used to have on your site but a specially generated xml file. You can have a sitemap.xml for your web site generated for free here – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

After you submit your site details, you need to verify or authenticate the web site which is pretty much like Google and Yahoo. Create a HTML file by copy and pasting the code provided in the page that loads on submission in Notepad and name the file as suggested. Here is an example -

That’s it. You are done. Just hit the ‘OK’ button and you will get the confirmation that your site has been aded to Live.com Webmaster Center.

Submitting your sitemap and other site details to Google, Yahoo and Live.com is very important as it helps the search engine robots to index your site properly and hence help you achieve higher positions in the search engine result pages.

“You give ‘Site Seer’ your URL and it will instantly extract and display all of the features of your site that the search engines use to rank you.”

To get this ‘must have’ tool you need to go here and opt in /register first. So, go ahead and do it if you haven’t done it already. There are some great videos to watch once you are registered and have access to the Site Seer page. These videos are parts of the Stompernet Going Natural 3.0 which was launched recently.

I have already tried this tool and it returned (actually emailed) with a real eye-opening report on the SEO status of one of my web sites. Here are some screen shots of the tool and the result.

It’s pretty easy to fill up the fields and submit your site details. And soon the system will send you an email containing the link to the result page. Here’s a few screenshots of the result page.

I must admit that I’m pretty impressed with the tool though it’s not ground breaking but still it’s very handy to have all information about your site in one place. And you will feel good to learn that there’s someone or something to look after the SEO of your site. It also suggests what you should do to promote your site including submitting your site to several resources.

So, without wasting any more time just rush to the Stompernet Going Natural 3.0 or simply go straight to the Site Seer page and get started right now.

Until next time.

Step 2: Notice the My Sites box on the right. Enter your web site’s URL and hit the Add My Site button.

Step 3: You will be prompted to login to Yahoo.

Step 4: You will be taken to a page which is kinda dashboard where you will find all the sites you have submit or will submit. Check the site you wanted to add and hit Manage.

Step 5: Hope you have already created and uploaded your sitemap.xml . Simply type sitemap.xml in the field provided and keep the sitemap type as Web Site Feed (from the drop down box). And click the Add Your Feed button.

Remember we are yet to authenticate our website, which will be the next step.

Step 6: Hit the green Authenticate button on the right when then page loads.

Step 7: The Verification page that comes up is very comprehensive and need no explanation. Just follow the steps and you will authenticate your site without any trouble. Download the verification file (you can also create it), upload to your server and hit the Ready to Authenticate button and you are done. You can also choose the Meta Tag method which is very similar to Google.

Step 8: Your site is pending authentication.

Do not remove the verification file from your server or delete the Meta Tag (should you opted for the Meta Tag method) and check back a couple of days later. Your site would be authenticated and will be indexed and get exposer in a far better way.

Firstly, open up the following sites in 3 different tabs of your browser (Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 supports tab browsing. however it’s not a criteria and you can do it by opening new windows or just do one by one on the same window).

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Live.com Webmaster Center

Login or sign up if you don’t have an account already. First we will learn to submit the site map to Google.

Google Webmaster Tools

Step #1 – Add your site

Step #2 – Click Verify your site when the next page loads.

Step #3 – You have to choose the verification method to verify your site. You have two options – you can verify by inserting a META tag or by uploading a blank file.

First, let’s see how the META tag works -

Insert the Meta tag in your site’s Home page source code as it is. Don’t change anything, just copy and paste the code between the head tags. Note the Meta tag just below the Meta keywords tag.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title>Title of your site goes here</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Give a cool description of your site here.” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3″ /><meta name=”verify-v1″ content=”9tW7D7+GgFDxvZKbaRFcqFlNOETT0NZ+8ehKmg48BY8=” />

<link href=”style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”images/favicon.ico”>

</head>

Save, Upload and Verify.

But, I prefer the File Upload method as described below.

Select the “Upload an HTML file” option instead of the earlier “Add a Meta Tag” from the drop down menu.

Create a blank HTML file and name it exactly as suggested by Google. To create a HTML file right click on your desktop or on the white space inside a folder and select New. Then select “Text Document” from the sub menu to create a text document. Rename the text document by replacing New Text Document.txt by the name provided by Google (for example, googleabCDEFgh12345IJKL67890m.html). An alert will pop up asking you whether you really want to rename the file. Hit Yes. And voila, your HTML file is ready to upload to your sever. Upload it to your root directory and first verify if it is really there by clicking the link provided. A blank page is what you are going to see but if you follow the address bar you will notice that url you just clicked a second back. If you have done something wrong the browser will return the “The webpage cannot be found” message.

Once you are satisfied, hit the Verify button.

Congratulations. You have successfully verified your site. Now proceed to upload your sitemap. Hope you have already created one and uploaded it to your server.

Step #4 – Now click the Sitemap menu from the left sidebar. Now click the Add a Sitemap link on the page which just loaded.

Step #5 – Choose your sitemap type as Add General Web Sitemap

Step #6 – You will now be prompted to add your sitemap. Just complete your Sitemap URL by typing sitemap.xml in the blank field. And hit the Add General Web Sitemap button.

Congratulations again. You have just added your sitemap to the Google. You can now expect better indexing of your pages.

Coming up next . . . how to add your sitemap to yahoo and MSN or Live.com.

Stay tuned.