Three ways to submit your XML Sitemap

XML Sitemap is a file where we display all the URLs of a website in order to get indexed in search engines. Creating XML sitemap and submitting XML sitemap will help you to inform search engines about web pages in your website.

Now let’s briefly see about the three ways to submit your XML sitemap

Using Google Webmaster Tools

This is a well known method to everyone in the SEO industry. Following are the steps involved in this type of submission.

1) Sign into Google Webmaster Account with your Google account
2) Add your website URL
3) Verify your ownership by uploading a HTML file or adding meta tag to get complete data about your website.
4) Get into the “Sitemaps” link present in the left menu
5) submit your sitemap URL in the given text box and submit it!

Listing Sitemap Files in Robots.TXT

Just enter your sitemap URL (full URL) in your robots.txt file. Following are the advantages in this type of submission

1) All search engines which supports sitemap protocol can crawl your sitemap file and index your web pages mentioned in it.
2) Since we are mentioning the full URL, it is possible to host your sitemap file in a different domain.

Below is my robots.txt content

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.mo$
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /forum/
Sitemap: http://www.seobyelan.com/sitemap.xml

Using an HTTP “ping”

If you are using dynamically generated XML sitemap, then this is the best way to re-submit your sitemap. For re-submitting, you have to sign into Google webmaster tools and have to click on re-submit sitemap. This is very simple method to resubmit your sitemap.

Following is the URL to type in browser

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

For example, if your sitemap is located at http://www.seobyelan.com/sitemap.xml, your URL will become:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.seobyelan.com/sitemap.xml

Once you hit enter after typing the above URL in browser, you will get the below information from Google.

“Sitemap Notification Received

Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.”