How to Use Sitemap Protocol For Search Engine Submissions

Much to the delight of webmasters everywhere, in 2006 the major search engines along with Microsoft came to an agreement regarding supporting the site map protocol. As a webmaster tool the site map protocol assists in reducing the time it takes to submit your web pages to the search engines.

There are some webmasters who have been using site maps for quite awhile however the site map protocol expands the benefits of using it further. The site map is an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about their web site and or web pages. This makes the process of updating or adding new pages to your web site and having them listed in the search engines a lot easier.

The search engine robots like site maps because they contain all the links to a web site. This makes the process of indexing a web site less time consuming. The XML site map provides valuable information to the search engines including:

Providing a site map on your website provides the search engine robots with the information they need to more intelligently index your site. Combining this with appropriate content and keywords can dramatically improve your website effectiveness and your ability to convert visitors into buyers. What the site map protocol does is create a standard that can be used by all the search engines to index web sites.

When a search engine robot visits a web site, it looks for all the relative links to all the pages contained in that particular website as well as the external links to other sites. Webmasters that include a site map provide the search engine robots with one focus location where all of their URL can be found. This can be extremely valuable to webmasters who use design elements on their site that the search engine robot has difficulty navigating.

With the site map protocol accepted by every major search engine, when you add a link to your site map file in your robots.txt file, it will be automatically included in the search engine index. Simply add this text to your robot.txt file:

Sitemap: http:/www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

In addition, webmasters can register their site map with Google and Yahoo however this is not possible with the other search engines. While the inclusion of a site map does not automatically guarantee that a web site will be included in the index; there are still a variety of issues that can prevent inclusion such as irrelevant keywords, lack of unique content or spam elements on your web page, it does provide an alternative means for the search engine robot to collect data regarding your web site.

As a webmaster you should be aware that even if the search engine robot collects data about your website via the site map this alone does not influence your page ranking; to achieve a high page ranking requires a combination of optimized web content and quality inbound links.

In order to take full advantage of the site map protocol, webmasters must focus their efforts on the webpage optimization standards set by the search engines as well as providing the quality information, services and products that are relevant to your visitor audience.

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