PharmiMike

This may seem obvious, and also more of an SEO point, but as I’ve just spent some time doing it myself, I thought I’d remind you!.

Google et al, rely heavily on sitemap.xml to know what’s on your site. Sure they can crawl and do crawl it, but why make their lives hard. By keeping a valid sitemap.xml file in the root of your site, you provide a link to all the pages on your site that the search engines should know about.  A few points:

• you should update your sitemaps every time you change content. (ie add a new job) so it should be done dynamically without you  having to get involved
• you can have multiple sitemaps. Useful if like on www.PharmiWeb.com, you have thousands of pages.
• you can add your sitemap(s) url to your robots.txt file (another essential) to help the engines keep track
• submit your sitemaps to google webmaster tools and bing
• Yahoo treat things differently, I’ll do that separately!

This is pretty important! but very simple. Its also only a very small step in a long journey! 

Simply go here  and enter the URL of your site.

Submit your site to google

But before you do that there are a number of checks you should do :

• Do you have a basic sitemap (a simple navigation method) ?
• Is your website search engine friendly?
• Do you have a Robots.txt file?
• Do you have a sitemap.xml file?

If you want to submit your site to BING, there are a few steps to go through.

How to Submit to site to Bing

1. Go to this URL if you want to submit your website to Bing. You will need to sign in with your Windows Live ID to access the webmaster center.

2. Enter the website URL and also sitemap URL (Good idea to have one!).

3. Next step is to verify your website and this can be done either with XML verification or HTML meta tag verification. You can get more details from the help center.

4. Once your website is validated, you will see details like number of URLs indexed, any issues etc.

Bing also has a tool for AdCentre keyword Suggestions, but it crashed when I tried to install it. so I’ll try again later.

You will also need to do a similar thing with Google and Yahoo.