Submit Your Site to Search Engines

I’m going to start a new series titled “Build a Niche Store Checklist.” Basically it will be a series of posts that lists the steps I take when building a new Build a Niche Store web site. My first entry in the series is a step I just performed 5 minutes ago for my most recent BANS site: submitting the site to the search engines.

(Note: I’m going to focus on BANS sites in this post, but you can perform these same steps for any of your web sites.)

Each of the three main search engines–Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search–have webmaster portals where you can tell the search engine about your web site, authenticate it so that they know it’s really your site, submit your sitemap.xml file, and more.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. There’s a few steps you need to take before you start working with the search engines.

First things first… make sure your site is finished before you proceed with these steps. Now I didn’t say make sure your site was perfect, rather just make sure it’s finished. What I mean by that is make sure your site is finished to the point where you are ready for visitors to come and start buying stuff. Obviously no site is perfect, and undoubtedly you’ll change and improve things over time, but you will want your site functional before asking the search engines to start indexing it. The most important part of this is to make sure you don’t have any unfinished or broken pages, and that you don’t plan on making any major changes to your site’s navigation structure anytime soon.

On my very first BANS web site, I changed the home page from “home” to the title of my niche. This changed every link on my site from www.domain.com/home/subpage to www.domain.com/niche/subpage. Months later Google still hasn’t fixed all of the links to show the new path. I’m not trying to tell you that you can’t make such a change on your site if it’s needed… just that if you have plans to do a change like that anytime soon, make your changes first, then work with the search engines.

Alright, now that we have that out of the way, here’s the process I follow to submit my BANS sites to the search engines. I’m going to stick with the 1, 2, 3 step approach, so hopefully that works for everyone to follow along easily.

1. Create a SITEMAP.XML file.
   A sitemap.xml file is an industry standard file you upload to the root of your web site. It helps search engines discover all of the pages on your web site. I use a free program called Vigos Gsitemap to generate my sitemap.xml files. This is a Windows program, so Mac users will have to find an alternative. (If you know of a good Mac alternative let me know and I’ll link it here.)I won’t get into the specifics of how to use Gsitemap, but basically it will spider your BANS site. Once that process is complete, you can tell it to generate a sitemap file, and then save that file to your desktop. Once the sitemap.xml file is saved to your desktop, I upload it to the root of my web site using Filezilla.
    
2. Create a ROBOTS.TXT file.
   This is another industry standard file that you also upload to the root of your web site. Making this file is really easy. Just open up your favorite text editor (on Windows I use Notepad). Inside the text file add the following text:

   User-agent: *
   Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

   Obviously change the sitemap path to be the URL for your web site. When you’re done, save the file with the filename “robots.txt” and upload it to the root of your web site.

   Having a robots.txt file does the following three things:

   a) all search engines automatically look for one, so having it will eliminate a bunch of 404 errors in your web stats;
   b) the User-agent: * line invites any and all search engine spiders to index your site;
   c) the Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml line (modified for your web site URL) tells all of the search engines where to find your sitemap.xml file.

   There’s a lot more you can do with a robots.txt file, but that’s pretty much all I use it for with my BANS sites. Actually, once you’ve done those two steps you could call it good and move on, because every search engine that finds your site will look for the robots.txt file, find that it’s welcome to index everything on the site, and be shown where to find your sitemap.xml file to aid it in discovering all of your site’s pages. I like to take it a step further however…
    

3. Authenticate your site with Google.
   Go to Google Webmaster Tools and click “Get Started” to login with your Google account. Once you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard where you can enter your site’s URL and click “Add Site.” Now Google will want you to authenticate your site. I always use the Meta Tag verification method. Simply copy the meta tag they provide. Next open up a new browser window, log into your BANS site’s admin page and go to the the templates area, and paste the meta tag you copied from Google into the header.php right below these existing tags:

   <?=$front->meta();?>
   <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />

   Once you have Google’s meta tag pasted into header.php, click save and go back over to the browser window  you still have open for Google’s webmaster tools site. Click the button to verify. If everything worked, Google will now recognize that you have verified the site.

   Next click the “Sitemaps” button on the left and add a “General Web Sitemap.” It defaults to your main site URL, so just add in the name of your sitemap file (most likely “sitemap.xml”).

   Finally, click on the “Tools” button on the left, and then click on the “Set preferred domain” link. This tells Google your preference on whether or not to display “www” in their index. I prefer to have Google always display the “www” for the majority of my sites. Don’t forget to click the “Ok” button to save your choice. Now you’re finished with Google.
    

4. Authenticate your site with Yahoo.
   Authenticating your site with Yahoo is very similar to authenticating with Google. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and use the link in the top left of the page to login with your Yahoo account. Once you’re logged in, just like with Google, you enter your site’s URL and click the “Add My Site” button. After you add your site it shows up in the main list.Next click on the “Authenticate” button on the right site of your site’s listing. Again I prefer using the Meta Tag verification method, so I copy the meta tag that’s displayed and paste it into my site’s header.php below the Google meta tag I already added. After I save my header.php file, I go back to Yahoo and click “Ready to Authenticate.”

   Yahoo does not authenticate sites immediately like Google does, but that’s okay, you can still submit your sitemap.xml file in the meantime. Click on the “Manage” button next to your site. Just like at Google, enter in the name of your sitemap file, keeping the default type as “Web Site Feed,” and click the “Add Feed” button. This submits your sitemap file to Yahoo. Now you’re done with both Google and Yahoo.
    

5. Authenticate your site with Windows Live Search (MSN).
   Not as many people bother authenticating with Windows Live, but I like to do this because… well… why not? Anything I can do to help my site with the search engines is a good thing in my book, and Windows Live is the third most popular search engine.Go to Live Search Webmaster Center and click the “Sign in to use the tools” button to login with your Windows Live ID. Next click the “Add a Site” button. Next enter in the URL of your web site and the full URL of your sitemap.xml file. So for example you’d enter http://www.domain.com/ for the web site address, and http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml for the sitemap address. Don’t worry because if you type in either path incorrectly, it will warn you when you try to submit. As always, I choose the Meta Tag verification method. You need to enter in a valid e-mail address, and signing up for the newsletter is up to you. Go ahead and click “Submit.”

   Next you’ll copy the meta tag and paste it into your site’s header.php file below the Google and Yahoo meta tags. After you copy it to your header.php and save, go back to Live Search Webmaster Center and click the “OK” button to finish adding your site. Now you’re finished with Windows Live Search.

 
Now You’re Finished!
Let’s recap everything you just did…

…you generated a sitemap.xml file and uploaded it to the root of your site. This file helps all search engines know where to find all the pages on your site.

…you created a robots.txt file and uploaded it to the root of your site. This file invites all search engines to index all of the pages on your site. It also tells them where to find your sitemap.xml file.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Google. Now Google knows about your site and your sitemap file. It also knows whether or not you prefer “www” for your site address. You can go back to Google from time to time and check for errors, see how many pages on your site Google has indexed, etc.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Yahoo. Now Yahoo knows about your site and your sitemap file. You can check back with Yahoo from time to time as it’s a great place to see what other sites on the web are linking back to your site.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Windows Live Search. Now Live Search knows about your site and your sitemap file. You can check back with Live Search from time to time to see how well your site is ranking in their search engine.

This may seem like a lot of work, but once you’ve done it a few times, it gets easier. I just followed these steps for my most recent BANS site, and the whole process took less than 10 minutes from start to finish. So this procedure is an easy and quick way to jump start your BANS site–or any of your web sites for that matter–with the search engines.

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Build a Niche Store Process Series

I want to point out an excellent resource for people starting out with the Build a Niche Store software titled “Build a Niche Store Process Series.” Authored by Mark Hansen, the series covers how to setup a profitable BANS store from start to finish.

I mention this site because I want to give credit where credit is due. Mark’s blog series really boosted my understanding of how to properly setup and use BANS to make commissions.

Now I’m not saying I agree with everything Mark discusses in the series. For example, he advocates a more passive approach to building the sites, through proper search engine optimization. The theory here is that if you base your BANS store around the proper keywords, once the search engines pick up your site, you’ll get natural traffic and sales through people using the search engines. While I agree with this strategy, I prefer combining it with a more proactive marketing approach.

However the beauty of Mark’s series is that it explains everything in such detail, that you can learn so much, even if you prefer to do things differently. In fact, my proactive marketing approach is better off after learning the things I read on Mark’s blog.

If you’re new to Build a Niche Store, you owe it to yourself to read the “Build a Niche Store Process Series.”

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