HomeAll the three search engine Google, Yahoo and MSN has provided webmaster with there own way of submitting XML or text based sitemaps for better indexing of websites and also provide them with webmaster tools for better performance over search engines. In this article I would tell about sitemap formats, how to submit sitemaps and webmaster tools provided by all three major search engines.
1. Google XML sitemaps and webmaster central tools: Google webmaster central allows you to submit XML sitemap and also provides you detailed information on how google view your site. You can check format for XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org or check Theseomarketing.com XML sitemap. After creating XML sitemap you need to login with your google account to http://www.google.com/webmasters and verify your site. Verification is basically to acknowledge that you are the actual owner of the site. Verification can be done in two ways either you can add given meta tag to your site or upload a verification file.
Once verification is done you have full access to webmaster central dashboard where you can have access to advanced features such as:
a) Settings: Using this tool you can provide google about information and preferences like geographic targeting, preferred domain (www or without www), image labeling option and google crawl rates etc.
b) Diagnostic: Here you can check crawling errors, content analysis (Problems related to Meta data) and mobile crawl errors.
c) Statistics: Statistics provides you with data such as top search queries, google crawl and index stats, google feed subscriber stats etc.
d) Links: Here you can control which pages of your website to include in google sitel
e) Tools: Tools provide you with ability to create enhanced 404 pages, analyze robots.txt, remove URLs, and manage site verification and various other gadgets you can use.
2. Yahoo Site Explorer tool: Yahoo site explorer allows you to add yahoo text sitemap. Yahoo text sitemap is basically in .txt format with all the pages of the website included. Once you have created and uploaded your yahoo text sitemap login at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com with yahoo id and submit your sitemap. Verification method in yahoo is also the same as that of google. After verification yahoo site explorer provides you with following features:
a) My sites: Here you can control sites you have added and explore yahoo saturation and backlinks for the sites.
b) Summary: Here you can see summary of your website submission like submission status like verification, number of users, number of feeds etc.
c) Statistics: Here you can check total crawled pages, hosts and domains that are used in internal and external links to your domain.
d) Crawl errors: Crawl errors related to your domain (if any) are displayed here.
e) Actions: remove urls and manage dynamic urls
3. MSN: MSN don’t have any particular sitemap format yet, however you can submit you site map at http://webmaster.live.com/ . Here you can specify your website and location of your html sitemap. Another way of submitting sitemap to MSN is add sitemap to the robots.txt file for your website.
