Whether you’re competing locally or nationally, submitting your website to search engines on a regular basis is a smart and easy way to boost your SEO. It involves first creating an XML sitemap which is basically a comprehensive directory of all the different pages within your site – this helps the web crawlers actually find each of the pages in your site. Ideally each page within your site will have been optimized through good SEO which makes the sitemap extremely valuable. I look at an XML sitemap as being analogous to a detailed table of contents and index for a written book.
Once a sitemap is completed it can then be submitted to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and any additional search engines of your choice. This helps ensure that more of your pages are indexed (recognized) and that your site as a whole is properly indexed which results in better quality and higher quantities of traffic driven to your site. Remember, by now each page within your site should be optimized for different keywords so you want all your pages to count and be recognized for their valuable content.
Think of a sitemap as a well organized table of contents and index of a book. The sitemap makes it easy for search engines to find and organize everything on your site for optimal retrieval every time a potential customer does a search engine search.
If you’re unfamiliar with how to create a sitemap, you could download the free trial of Coffee Cup’s Sitemapper. But before going any further with the process of submissions , consider that manually submitting your sitemap to all the major search engines plus hundreds or thousands of secondary engines can be a tedious process to carry out on a regular basis. Let’s face it, most of us can hardly remember to take our vitamins every morning much less creating a sitemap and submitting it to hundreds or even thousands of search engines each month.
Doing nothing means you rely on Google and the other search engines to index your pages merely by happenstance which undoubtedly puts you behind in the game. There’s no guarantee of any regularity to this method because changes or additions (improvements) made to your site may not be recognized at all or in a timely fashion. Now how would you feel if you spent hours adding a new keyword rich page or even new service offerings to your site with the hopes of reaching new potential customers who never saw your pages because they weren’t picked up by the search engines and shown in the search results?
Furthermore, your major competition may very well be submitting on a monthly basis which means their sites will carry more clout with the search engines.
A good quality automated program can do the work for you. It will also detect and help correct errors (bad links, etc.) within your pages in addition to creating a quality sitemap along with a robots.txt file to ensure that each of your pages are properly indexed and then re-indexed with all the search engines on a regular basis.
I use and recommend the services of Search Engine Blaster
It requires no software installation on your end and they index your site with all the major search engines plus thousands more every 4-6 weeks. Check it out but give the page a few moments to load. The $14.99 monthly fee I find to be quite reasonable for such a service. There are no long-term contracts but I recommend trying the service for at least six months at minimum.
It’s been my experience that regularly having pages re-indexed properly with the search engines maximizes the SEO process. This activity is often overlooked yet it’s a simple and effective way to enhance SEO and flow of targeted inbound traffic. An investment of
$15 per month for automatic submissions is well worth the money, not to mention the time savings. I’ve personally seen great improvements in search engine ranking within a month or less from the time automatic submissions have started for my clients. For anyone looking to increase their position in the search engine listings I highly recommend automatic submissions as a way to climb and remain atop your competition.
If you’ve been progressing through our series of “do it yourself” blog posts, I suggest moving on to the online business directory post at this time. There is a cost-effective way to have your business listing blasted all over the internet to heavily trafficked business directories.
Tags: robots.txt, sitemap, sitemaps, xml sitemaps
