Sitemaps

Sitemaps are always a little fun. You get to see just how many pages your site has and which ones are more important to you. But, they are really important for search engines. It helps the automated search spiders find all the pages you have and then they can gain a helpful perspective based on the last update and your priority ranking.

This is the website to check out if you want to learn more about Sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

I usually do my sitemaps in PHP. So, I am going to break new ground here and drop some code on my blog. Since most of my sites are now PHP, here is what I typically use:

<?PHP header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset= UTF-8"); ?>
<?PHP echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n"; ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.mydomain.com/</loc>
  <lastmod><?PHP 
     echo date ("Y-m-d", filemtime("index.php")); 
     ?></lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
 <url>
  same stuff here...
 </ulr>
 
 ... and add more urls as needed
 
</urlset>

Make sure you test the URL in your browser first, but then it should be good to go. You can let the search engines know about it in the webmaster tools or even add a reference to it in your robots.txt file ("Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.php").

New Site - Search Engine Submission

Do you have a new website? Is it time to let the world know about it? Then submit it to the major search engines! And don't be fooled, this is not something you have to pay for. There are a lot of people out there trying to make money by submitting your site to search engines for you. You don't need to do this because it is really easy and straight forward.

According to Hitwise.com, the top 4 used search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Almost 97% of all searches done on the internet are through one of these engines. So, these are the guys you will want to inform about your new website.

Visit each of the links, and you should be good to go:

• Google


• Yahoo (you'll have to make an account)


• MSN Live UPDATE new URL for Bing


• Ask (you'll have to make a sitemap)