How to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Live.com

April 27, 2008 – 8:34 am

For better indexing and thus higher ranking of your web site you should always submit your site map to Google, yahoo and MSN (live.com). It’s not the regular html site map on your website rather it’s an xml file universally named as sitemap.xml. You can create it yourself or even better you can get it generated for free at XML-Sitemaps. After you have created the sitemap download / copy it and save it to your local hard drive and upload it to your web site root ( normally public_html). To check you have uploaded it properly type http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/sitemap.xml . if it loads properly you are ready to proceed to the next step.

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

Step #1 – Add your site

Add your site to Google

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

verify your site

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.

choose the verification method

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

META Tag verification

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.

Upload HTML file verification method

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.

your site is verified

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.