Submitting my Website to Google
Now that my website is almost finished, it is time to start submitting it to the major search engines. I am going to start by submitting it to “The Search Engine”.
Google has a free online platform – Google Webmasters Tools – that allows us, webmasters, to register a website and submit its sitemap. After some weeks the website is indexed by this search engine and we start getting some relevant analytics. Hopefully some visitors too.
But, before submitting my sitemap to Google, I need to create one. This is the best way to tell Google how many and what URLs it should add to it’s database. For this, I am going to use another amazing free web based platform from “Audit My PC” called Google Sitemap Generator. It is very easy to use and very effective.
If you have a dynamic website you will probably get URLs that you didn’t even know existed. All the explanations on how to use the tool are there so it shouldn’t be difficult to get your sitemap in a few minutes.
After downloading your website’s sitemap, rename it to “sitemap.xml” and upload it to your server. Place it in your website’s root folder. Then, head back to Google Webmasters Tools and submit it. Google will download and analyze your sitemap but you may have to wait a few hours before you see the confirmation that your website’s status is OK.
It is done! All you have to do now is wait and update your sitemap every once in a while to alert Google about your new URLs.
