Google offers a wide assortment of different tools available for site owners and webmasters to track and monitor a website’s performance. Additionally, you can help Google in the process by submitting an XML sitemap, which essentially tells Google to crawl your site, and which pages are available for crawling.
To start, you will first create your XML Sitemap. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.
Enter your website into the first box, change the frequency to slightly more often than you currently update your site, to make sure that it’s crawled regularly. For example, if you update your site monthly, choose the weekly option. Use the default for the Last Modification setting and set priority to automatic, then click Start. You will receive several different options for downloading your sitemap, including an email option. I usually prefer the un-compressed .XML version. Select your file and save to your computer, in the folder where your HTML website files reside.
Now, to create your Google account and upload your file. If you don’t already have one a Google webmaster account, go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools, where you will see a sign up/log in window.
Once your account is set up, you can proceed to add your site. I have several client sites set up in my account, but we will add a new site.
Click the Add a Site button, then type in the URL of the site you wish to add, then click Continue.
You will then be asked to verify the site ownership. You can do this in several ways, but for this tutorial we will upload an html file to the server. This is the simplest of the options, as it does not involve editing the code in any way. You simply FTP to your server and upload the file. I use Dreamweaver, however there are several free FTP client utilities that are available including File Zilla and SmartFTP. There is plenty of documentation available to walk you through the steps of using these utilities. You must have your website’s server FTP account user name and password to access this, or if your web designer has not already uploaded an XML sitemap for you, you can email the file to them for uploading to your site. You can also link to an existing Google Analytics account, if you have one.
Click the link to download the HTML verification file, and save it to your computer, in the same location where you saved your Sitemap. Log on to your site’s server and upload both files. When this is complete, come back to this screen and click the Verify button. You will then be in your dashboard.
Click the Submit a Sitemap link in the bottom right corner.
Click the Submit a Sitemap button to expand the box and finish typing the URL of your sitemap, i.e. www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Click “Submit Sitemap” .
You will now be redirected back to your dashboard, where you can eventually view other data about your site, once that data has been collected. For the purposes of this tutorial, I am showing you the dashboard of my site, www.theresasheridan.com. Some of the helpful information here includes search queries and keywords that are being used by people to find your site, and what other sites are providing backlinks back to your website. All of this information, combined with Google Analytics, is invaluable in monitoring your site and keeping up to date with your SEO efforts.
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Theresa, This is very valuable information! Many website owners are under the impression that your site is automatically searched once you create it. I love that you walked through the steps, Thank you for sharing!
I’m so glad you found it useful Christine, thanks so much for commenting!
I really love this blog and the way its laid out, ty I have bookmarked.
[...] Use an XML sitemap. You can get one of these from Google as well, but I like XML Sitemaps. Type in your URL, download the .xml file that it creates and upload it to your website. Sitemaps provide very crawl-worthy text for hungry little web spiders. For more information on this read Using Google Webmaster Tool to Verify Your Site & Submit a Sitemap. [...]