Create and submit XML sitemaps

XML sitemaps are a proven way of ensuring your blog / website and all its pages are recognized by search engines. Creating and submitting / pinging your sitemap to the popular search engines, especially the big 3 Google, Yahoo! and Bing, is simple.

To create an XML sitemap, you can use some great free online XML Sitemap generators. I have listed some of my favorites below:

XML Sitemap Generator
Note: Also generates a text file of broken links.

XML Sitemap
Note: Allows sub level domains too. For eg: http://www.mysite.com/sublevel.

Create XML Site Maps

Once you have create your XML Sitemap, you need to upload it to your web server and submit it to search engines.

To submit your sitemap to Google and Yahoo!, visit this post. This post explains how to submit your blog sitemap, but the process to submit your website sitemap is the same.

Another way to submit your sitemap to Yahoo!:

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

and

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

To submit your sitemap to Bing visit the Webmaster Center. The process to submit your sitemap here is similar to submitting to Google Webmasters Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. You can also ping the service:

www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

or previously

http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

To submit your sitemap to Moreover.com:

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

To submit your sitemap to Ask.com:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Note: Replace http://www.mysite.com/ with your URL.

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