How to submit sitemap to Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask

I have seen many ads on different web sites about submitting to 100+ search engines for a certain amount of dollars. First off, you can submit your web sites to any search engines free. It is not brain surgery, it is very simple.

The only thing you will need is a web site and your sitemap in XML format. Here is my sitemap.xml

If you have a website but don’t have a sitemap.xml file or don’t know how to make a sitemap.xml, go to this website to create your sitemap. Simply enter your domain name, set everything as default, and click start. It will crawl your website and automatically generate your sitemap.xml free.

I never use anyone of these sitemap generator websites since I am using WordPress and it has a plugin to auto generate my sitemap.xml

Anyway, here are the free sitemap.xml generators.

xml-sitemaps
xmlsitemap

Or Google up “generate sitemap.xml”

For WordPress users, download and activate Google XML Sitemaps. This is a must have plugin for WordPress blogs, it automatically generate your sitemap.xml file and it gives you more options for your sitemap settings.

Once you have your sitemap.xml ready, it is time to submit it to the search engines. The main search engines I like to submit to are Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo! and Ask.com. I don’t see any reason to submit to any other search engines besides those four, since Google on its own get the most users than all other search engines combine. You can see the search engine statistics for Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.

Submitting sitemap.xml to Google

To submit your sitemap.xml to Google, first you will need to make an account at Google webmaster central. Once you created and login to your Google webmaster account.

Step 1
Click Add a site…and enter your domain name and click continue.

Step 2
Verified you are the site owner. You may add the Meta tag on your HTML header or download a HTML file and upload the HTML to your home root folder on your domain. Once you select one of the method , click Verified.

Step 3
Once you verified you are the site owner, you are now able to view your website’s statistic on your Dashboard. Now it is time to add your sitemap.xml by going to the left hand side under Site Configuration> Sitemaps>Submit a Sitemap

Enter your sitemap.xml URL and click Submit Sitemap. Wait for a few hours for the Google to pick up your sitemap and you’re done.

Also, if you have many websites you can easily add them into one Google webmaster central account and add as many sitemap.xml as you need. In addition, keep in mind that once the websites are verified. You can view other cool statistics inside your Google webmaster account. It’s not only a place where you submit your sitemap.xml but also a good place to check out other useful and interesting stats on your sitemap.

Google webmaster central is by far the most robust sitemap statistic tool when compare to any other sitemap account like Bing and Yahoo!. That is why Google is the best search engine today.

Submitting sitemap.xml to Microsoft Bing

Step 1
Go to Bing Webmaster Center and create a account.

Once you have an account and login, your main page should look like this.

Step 2
Click on Add a site and fill out the form on that page then click submit.

Step 3
Verified you are the site owner by uploading a file or adding a meta tag within your HTML header. Once you done that go back to the main Bing webmaster page and click on the website you added. It should now been pick up by Bing and look like this and you’re done.

Submitting sitemap.xml to Yahoo!

Step 1
Create an account at Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Step 2
Verified you are the website owner and you’re done.

Submitting sitemap.xml to Ask.com

This is the easiest one, simply copy and paste this into your browser:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoursite.com/yourmap.xml

Then change www.yoursite.com/yourmap.xml to match your sitemap URL. Hit enter and you are done.

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