Getting Your Pages Indexed In A Matter Of Hours

I regularly see folks putting up Web sites but don’t know how to get the pages indexed by the Search Engines. Some think the SEs will somehow magically find all of them somewhere someday.

I haven’t come across that magic yet.

Still, there are several methods available for getting your pages indexed in a matter of hours. Today, I’m going to talk about one of them…

Sitemap files

Although they might have heard of them somehow somewhere, there are still lots of Webmasters out there that don not implement an XML Sitemap file to their sites. It’s a pity because Search Engines LOVE them.

I’m not talking about a Sitemap for your human visitors; I’m talking about one created particularly for the SEs, in a predefined format. For more details see www.sitemaps.org.

Google initially created this concept, then worked with Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft to make it a standard protocol that all four Search Engines can use.

Now, when you run your Internet business with content rich Web sites, there are tools available online which create a Sitemap file for you. Just go to Google and enter “sitemaps generator” or something similar and you’ll find plenty.

If you own a blog there is a WordPress Google Sitemaps plugin available that I personally use and recommend. It updates your Sitemap file automatically whenever you update an old or publish a new post or page. Very neat.

Once you’ve set everything up you are ready to submit your Sitemap file(s) to the four big SEs. Since this is a very helpful step for your Internet business, I took the time and compiled the below how-to guide for you. These are the exact same steps I follow myself in order to get my sites and pages indexed in a matter of hours.

Alright, here we go…

Google

1. Sign up to Google Webmaster Tools and/or go straight to Google Sitemaps Login.
2. Submit you Site URL by adding your domain name(s) to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
3. Optional: If you want to take advantage of Google’s comprehensive statistics and crawl reports, go ahead and “Verify your site.” (A yellow “Next Step” box shall appear near the top at this moment.)
4. Next, click on the “Sitemaps” link in the NavBar on left hand side, then on “Add Sitemap.”
5. In the drop-down that appears, choose “Add General Web Sitemap.”
6. Enter the Sitemap’s URL into the box that says “My Sitemap URL is:” (though without the domain name and the http:// prefix since it’s already there.)
7. If you have more than one Web site to manage and Sitemap file to submit, click on the “Dashboard” link on top to submit and manage your other sites.

Yahoo!

1. Go to the Yahoo! Site Explorer and submit your home page (first field, where it says “Submit a Website”)
2. When you’re done, go back to the Yahoo! Site Explorer and submit your Sitemap file (second field, where it says “Submit Site Feed”)
3. Click on the green “Authenticate” button in the upper right to certify ownership. Whether you added a META tag or uploaded a file, remember to keep either version active for as long as you manage the site. Who knows… If you remove it, Yahoo! might simply go ahead and dismiss your site from their index. Not a good thing, is it.. ;-)
4. If you have more than one site to manage and Sitemap file to submit, click on the “Site Explorer Home” link on top to submit and manage your other sites.
5. Optional: Check back after a day or two to see the status of the authentification; hence whether there are any issues.

Live

1. Go to the Live Search Webmaster Central. If you don’t have an MSN or Live account yet, create one and then sign in.
2. Click on the “Add a Site” button.
3. Enter the full URL of the site you’re about to manage, and below that enter the full URL of the respective Sitemap file.
4. Choose which method you’re going to use for ownership verification. (More details are going to appear once you clicked on the “Submit” button.)
5. Enter your contact info. (Don’t know if this is obligatory, but I entered it anyway; maybe kind of verification v.2 ;-)
6. Now you get to see details for the verification method you chose a step before. Once you’ve uploaded the XML file or put the META tag to your site’s home page, click “OK”. Again, keep the file or the META tag active for as long as you own or manage that site.
7. Want to add more sites? Click on the “Add a Site” button. If you don’t see that button, click on the “See all your websites” link on right hand side and it shall appear.

Ask

Unfortunately, Ask does not provide a “Webmaster Central” kind of thing (yet) so you cannot control whether they captured your Sitemap file(s) or to have other neat little tools. They provide a foolproof 10-second method though. Here we go…

1) Copy and paste the following URL into a plain text editor (ex., NotePad, TextEdit)…

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//

2) See that http%3A// at its end? Put the Sitemap file’s URL after it but without the http://

So the final URL should look like this…

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

(I used “sitemap.xml” as the example file name. Though, I recommend you use another file name, one that can not be easily guessed; ex., 3KLfu54.xml.)

3) Now paste that line into your browser’s address bar and hit enter. Ask will then confirm the success of your Sitemap submission. If not, check the correctness of the URL again. (Ex., are there any spaces before, between, or at the end; any line breaks, etc.)

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Phew; that’s it!

You’ve now successfully submitted your Sitemap file(s) to the four big Search Engines Boys! This shall help pumping up your Internet business substantially. Again, these four cover 95% of all searches performed online.

NOTE: Submitting your Sitemap file to the SEs does not warrant high rankings, nor does it guarantee to get all pages indexed in “5 minutes.” Still, it does help getting indexed much faster and a lot more pages though. ;-)

Let me know how it goes?

—Marcus Hochstadt