Besides word of mouth, paid advertising and linking a way to get a LOT of traffic to your site is through search engines. But it is not really clear at times HOW to submit your site let alone submit it on YOUR terms.

Years ago you used to simply get a link on a page that the search engines knew about or fill out a simple form and in a few weeks the search engines would be by to pick up your site. For the more anxious paid submissions or submission services were the answer. Now many search engines have opened up their submission process. I’m not going to go into every search engine submission process but cover four biggies(i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask) Read More Below...

Note: as of writing Live Search (or MSN) does NOT support sitemaps YET however they have said near the end of 2007 they will be using them

The preferred method of submission is to create a sitemap. Often misnamed a google sitemap it is now a standard format agreed on by the largest search engines. Simply put a sitemap is a list of links on your site you want the search engines to index.

The sitemap format or protocol is defined in GREAT detail at sitemaps.org. It’s a simple XML file that lists all of the pages you want indexed. Now this does NOT mean that it guarantees those pages will appear in the search engines let alone for the keywords you want them to rather just ‘hints’ to the indexers on where the content is. The neat thing is that this one protocol works will Google, Ask, Yahoo and MSN. So the work you put into creating a sitemap goes for many sites.

The acutal file may be a bit confusing especially for those who just run a blog or are just novice web developers. The good news is that there are many sitemap generators and many are free. If you only run one or two sites that are less than 100 pages or so don’t pay for ANY kind of service if you are the webmaster. With a little practice you can have your sitemap working and up in no time.

A few tips on creating a site map if you use a sitmap generator.

• Don’t run the crawler as FAST as you can. On some sites it will slow them down and even crash the website. Run them slowly it will take a bit more time but you’ll not end up taking down your site.
• Check your results for missing or bad pages. Sometimes the sitemap generators create a bit MORE than you need.
• Some crawlers crawl the filesystem indexing EVERYTHING rather than following URLS. So be careful and review your links. (Yes redundant and repetitive)

For the more adventurous who want to try their hand at creating a sitemap by hand this is what an example looks like
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.thehelpcenters.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-10-13T02:43:00+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url> <loc>http://www.thehelpcenters.com/2007/10/11/getting-colors-from-anywhere-on-your-screen/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-10-13T02:43:00+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thehelpcenters.com/about/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-10-12T15:41:26+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thehelpcenters.com/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-10-12T15:40:16+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thehelpcenters.com/archives/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-10-12T15:39:39+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Yes a little scary (and not the whole site) but this is a sitemap generated automatically by a wordpress blog add in.

For more complex sites the sitemap protocol allows for multiple files and even gzipping (a way to reduce download size) the sitemap. For the most part the above format should work for most sites.

You can update your sitemap as often as you add or remove pages. Remember the sitemap is just a hint so you don’t have to obsess if you just change a page.

If you have a favorite tool or hint on creating a sitemap feel free to comment. Also look for Part 2 in this series of posts Sitemap Submission.