Here are some instructions for submitting your sitemap to google.
Go to Google and sign in if you have an account, If you don’t, follow the steps to set one up. You do not need an account but it gives you a bit more accessibility to other Google tools.
Once you have signed in go to settings and in the drop down menu click account settings in the upper right.
If webmaster tools is not in the section headed by My Products then you can go down to the bottom of the page under Try Something New and look for the link that says more>>. This will take you to a complete list of google apps. If like me you don’t see web master tools in this page either just google it or copy and paste http://www.google.com/webmasters/start
in the browser.
Once you have signed in the webmaster tools home page will come up and here you will need to add your site. Click on the add site dialog box and type in your URL
(www.whatever.com) once you have done that click continue and follow the instructions to verify
you are the owner of the site.
Now you have your site on the webmaster home page. Click on your site and the Dashboard will come up. Feel free to look through the navigation on the left. There is a lot and you should familiarize yourself with the tools. I felt the most important thing to do at this stage was to make sure that Google had my sitemap.xml verified. So go to Site Configuration and in the drop down list click sitemaps.
If you are not sure if you have a sitemap.xml file check with the person that built your site or
get into your server and look for a file named sitemap.xml. Once you have found it make sure that
when the file is opened it has a complete list of the url’s for your site and that they all either
start with www. or don’t. (Some webhosting, like yahoo, do not put in the www. so for example
when we set up portland photo studio with yahoo webhosting the url was http://portlandphotostudio.com .
not sure why but when i find out i will let you know) So anyway all the url’s in the sitemap.xml
file must start the same way or you will end up with an error. Don’t worry, you will be aware of
any errors and you can fix them if there are.
if you do not have a sitemap.xml file go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ for a free
sitemap generator or build one yourself by following the instructions at http://www.sitemapxml.co.uk/
So you have found your sitemap.xml file. Click on submit sitemap and a dialog box will appear
with your site url and a place to type in the file name. Type in the file name (sitemap.xml) and click submit. Now is a good time to do some more exploring as it takes a bit for the site map to download and
for google to check it. when you go back to the sitemap page and there is a green check mark
then google has downloaded your sitemap and there were no errors. If there is a red x then you
need to click on the file that is next to it (probably sitemap.xml) and correct the errors.
There will also be a link to the google sitemap errors description page.
There is alot you can do with the webmaster tools so don’t be afraid of it and the great
thing about the internet is that you can always google any questions you may have.
Tags: google, SEO, sitemap, webmaster tools
