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How to submit your website (using sitemaps) to search engines

So you have built your website and it looks good but you do not know how to submit your new website to the major search engines. This article will show you how to do just that.

Firstly however I shall tackle some common half-truths out there.

The search engines will find you anyway through backlinks or other means

This is mostly true with a few caveats. If you are a complete newbie to owning or running a website then chances are that you do not know a lot about backlinks or even how to make your website SEO friendly. Consequently the chances of the major search engines finding you through backlinks or SEO input is minimal to nil. While the major search engines will eventually find you, without any backlinks or SEO input, the timeframe for this is uncertain.

Pay an online firm to submit your site to hundreds of search engines

An option that may initially seem like a good idea however I would strongly advise against this as it is an unjustified waste of money. Instead of paying a firm to submit your website, you can save the money and submit the website yourself to the major search engines. Currently Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask have more than 90% of the search engine market share (varies depending on part of the world) with Google being the most dominant.
As most of your search traffic will be coming from these search engines, it is vital that you submit your website to them and this can be done without the aid of online firms.

Now that is taken care of, onto site submission.

Please note that the methods outlined below involve the use of sitemaps and do not cover simple site submission (submitting just your homepage URL). I would strongly recommend using sitemaps instead of just submitting your homepage URL as this will provide the search engine crawlers with more information about your website.

The sitemap described below is a simple text based sitemap and NOT an XML sitemap. As this article is targeted at beginners, I feel that it will be much simpler for them to create a text based sitemap rather than an XML sitemap.

1. Create your website.

2. Create a simple text based sitemap using notepad or other text editor as follows:

• Open a new file in notepad. Enter your website addresses (for this example we shall use mywebsite.com) as shown below.
  
  www.mywebsite.com
  www.mywebsite.com/about.htm
  www.mywebsite.com/products.htm
  www.mywebsite.com/contact.htm

• Save the file with the filename urllist.txt

3. Upload the file urllist.txt to the root of your website (for clarification, this means the same area where your homepage is located).

4. Submit the sitemap to the major search engines via:

• Yahoo:  http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://www.mywebsite.com/urllist.txt

• Google:  http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mywebsite.com/urllist.txt

• MSN/Livesearch:  http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.mywebsite.com/urllist.txt

• Moreover/MSN:  http://api.moreover.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.mywebsite.com/urllist.txt

• Ask.com:  http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.mywebsite.com/urllist.txt
  
  

Copy and paste the above links into your address bar. Remember to change the website address to your web address (mywebsite.com).

Remember to keep your sitemap updated. If you add or remove any pages to your website, remember to update the sitemap and notify the search engines of the change by repeating step 4 above.