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SEO Articles | Search Engine Optimization
Articles about Search Engine Optimization SEO | from LinksAreBlue.com. If you have a great article please send it in and I will post it with a links back to you. My Email is joed@joed.com.
Verifying and Registering Your Site at Google, MSN and Yahoo
Before we start registering and verifying we need to create a Site Map of our site. I found one that I like that you can download from our downloads section or from http://www.trytobreak.com
I only found one bug in it but it's an easy work around. When it displays a date like: 2007-1-29 you need to do a find and replace on the completed sitemap and replace that with: 2007-01-29. It seems that Google needs to see that leading 0 for some reason on dates. So if you already have an .xml format sitemap you are good to go if not download this program and come back here and we will move on.
Ok you should upload your sitemap to your root web directory... that's where the main page of your site is and call it sitemap.xml. You should be able to address it as: http:/www.xyz.com/sitemap.xml
First we will start out at MSN because they don't make you jump through hoops to register a site. Just go to: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSUT Put your sitemap url (http:/www.xyz.com/sitemap.xml) into the block there and type in their little verification numbers and click the Submit Url button. While you are there you may want to also register your standard URL too (http:/www.xyz.com/). See that was easy wasn't it?
Now let's move on to Google. Here you will need to pull up your index.html file or whatever your main page is called into your editor. Then go to this link: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. If you don't already have an account there you will need to set one up. Then login and click the ADD SITE button. Then you put in the main url for your site. Once again that would be something like: http:/www.xyz.com/. You will see it add the site and say NOT VERIFIED. Click that link for verification and choose the Meta Tag option. It will produce a Meta Tag for you and you paste that in the HEAD section of your Web Page. A good spot is right after the title tag. Then FTP the page to your Web Site with that Meta Tag on it and click the verify button. Google will instantly go out, grab that page and verify it.
The next step is to choose the ADD SITEMAP option and paste in the url of your sitemap. Now comes the hard part. It will take google about 10 minutes or so to download your sitemap. Just keep that page open, go make yourself a cup of coffee and come back in 10 minutes. Better that go take the old clothes off your treadmill and use it for 10 minutes.
OK now click the refresh button on your browser and if all went well you will see under sitemap, it says OK. You are now done with Google. If it sees an error it will tell you what it is and you can fix it and go hit the treadmill for another 10 minutes. Once you see it says OK you are good and we will move onto Yahoo.
Now go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites/ Once again you will need to register there and set up an account. Then add your site. Yahoo will then tell you that you need to verify it. So then Yahoo will give you an html file to download and then you upload it to your site. Once again tell it you are ready to verify.
Then put in your sitemap's url --- this is the same sitemap as you use for Google and MSN. All the major search engines have finally standardized on the sitemap.xml format so at least that makes things a bit easier. Then come back and check it in a day or so. It takes Yahoo a bit longer to verify it seems then Google.
That was easy now wasn't it. Stop back here to check for new articles. I will post them as I find something interesting.
REMEMBER LINKS SHOULD ALWAYS BE BLUE!
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