Index your Content in Days rather than Months

Hudson Horizons HH Sitemap Manager - Google Sitemap Protocol - Google Sitemaps - Yahoo! Site Explorer - Index your content in days rathern than months - search engine optimizationAs many of us know, the most common way our content becomes indexed in a search engine is through the process of search engine crawling. How it works is simple - a search engines crawler comes and visits our website every so often, captures some data and updates their search index with this newly captured information.

Well thats all fine and dandy but the problem is, sometimes it takes anywhere from 30-90 days for any new content and pages to be indexed, depending on the search engine. For us website owners, this is not a feasible solution considering we need to have our content indexed in days, not months. If we want to successfully run our business and focus to increase our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) then we need to figure out another way to get our content indexed much more rapidly.

Today Im going to explain a simple way to get your new content and pages indexed in Google and Yahoo! in a matter of days, rather than months, and depending on your needs this can be a manual process or you can have it fully automated for your business. Now since both of these search engines are from different companies, there are two processes that you need to focus on and they are the Google Sitemap Protocol and Yahoo! Site Explorer.





Both of these tools offer you a way to create a file of all the pages in your website and submit that list to Google and Yahoo! directly. Whatever pages are listed in that file, their search index will populate those pages and tell their crawlers to go get the content. By doing this, you are simply telling the search engines where your pages and content are, rather than relying on their crawlers to come visit and find your pages on their next crawling process.

To help explain the tools, heres an overview on each:

Google Sitemaps - The Google Sitemap Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial in situations when it is difficult for users to access all areas of a website through the browse-able interface. For example, sites with a large "archive" or "database" of resources that aren't well-linked to each other (if at all) only accessible via a search form. The webmaster can generate a sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines.

Note that the Sitemap Protocol is only a supplement and does not in any way replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a sitemap (or Sitemaps) to a search engine a webmaster is only helping that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s).

Yahoo! Site Explorer - The Yahoo! search database contains detailed information about links between web pages and uses that information (as well as additional algorithms) to gauge the popularity of a given page.

Site Explorer is a tool that lets you access the information we have about a site's online presence. You can see which sites and sub-pages are indexed by Yahoo! Search, track sites that link into webpage, and view the most popular pages from any site. Use Site Explorer to:


* Find which sub-pages within a URL are indexed by Yahoo!.

* Find pages that link to that site or any page. (in-links)

* Submit and track feeds for your sites.


You can get even more detailed information about a site or its URLs when you authenticate the site. Exploring a site is as easy as doing a web search but instead of entering a "query term" you will enter a site's URL. A Site Explorer search will not return the same results that a web search would. Instead, Site Explorer uses the URL you submit to return particular information related to the structure of that URL in the Yahoo! Search database and on the Web.


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For further analysis, you can export Site Explorer data in a tab-separated (TSV) form. Also check out Site Explorer's Web Services APIs for ways to help you understand your site traffic and usage better. Note: You can submit missing URLs to the Yahoo! Index for free. If you own a site, register it with us to see even more information and simplify managing any site feeds you have.

How do I implement a Google Sitemap and a Yahoo! Site Explorer feed?

I highly recommend setting up a Google Sitemap using the Google Sitemap Protocol and submitting a site feed to Yahoo! using their Yahoo! Site Explorer.

If youre thinking of taking your SEO to the next level, then you should absolutely start here. If you can force your pages and content to be indexed in days, rather than months, then you will be sure to increase your websites visibility, generate more website traffic and ultimately increase your sales.

If youre looking to manage both of these manually, then I recommend visiting Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer online sections, which will provide you with all the details of how to create and submit your feeds to their search index.

If youre looking to setup an automated submission of Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer, then you should visit Hudson Horizons HH Sitemap Manager for more information. Their system will automatically crawl your website, create a site feed of your URLs and submit the file to both Google and Yahoo! every three days.