Search Engine Optimization

Posted on April 28, 2009 | Category: Networking

So, you have a blog or website that you need to publish and make searchable. Here are a few quick links and how to’s to get you into the major search engine players.

The first thing that you have to do is visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to create a sitemap for your site(s). Download and place the .xml and urllist.txt in your main web server directory. Word to the wise, if you have over 500 links or pages, you will have to fork out the dough or figure out another method (e.g. php or other server-side scripting). But, that is another post, at another time.

Once you have placed those two files in your server directory, you are mostly on your way. I’ll go down the list of major search engine players and what to do below.

Google

Visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and submit your sitemap. Shame on you if you do not already have an account. Google should crawl your site pretty fast if my experiences are any indication.

Yahoo

Visit https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites and submit your sitemap. Again, you will need to create an account for this one. Yahoo likes the urllist.txt format, so make sure that is the one you submit. They do take the .xml version, but the text format is just too easy

MSN

I found that MSN seems to make it difficult to submit your info. However, at last call MSN was known to crawl Moreover. So, copy and paste the web address below into your browser address bar. Remember to check the address and change out the domain for yours.

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://YOURBLOGNAME/sitemap.xml

Ask.com

Do the same as above. Remember, change your web address.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME/rss.xml