This is the second part of getting your website indexed. The first part is here. After you completed the website verification process, it is time to generate a sitemap to be submitted. A sitemap is essentially a .xml file which has the following key information: links present in your website and information on how often your website is updated.

1) Go to dashboard, then on the left-hand side link “Sitemaps”.

2) Open your browser and go to http://www.makeasitemap.com/ — which is an online sitemap generator. Best of all its FREE!

Type in your domain name below:

Scroll down and select “Frequency” on how often you will be updating the website.

Keep the “Last Modified Date” as the day you create the sitemap.

Keep default priority as 0.5.

Keep default priority values on Strip Session ID. This has no effect especially if your website is static HTML pages. For PHP-enabled pages, example is this blog - then this an important key that you must take note of. But for such PHP pages, I do not recommend using this online sitemap generator. Instead I recommend a proper sitemap generator program.

3) Watch as the various links on your website gets gathered one-by-one. Looks cool.

Scroll down to the bottom and click download sitemap. Save it as “sitemap”. Make sure the document type is XML.

3) Open up Filezilla again. Upload the sitemap.xml to the root directory of your domain name.

4) Go back to Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. Type in the sitemap.xml at the top right hand corner.

5) Click on “Submit Sitemap”.You should see the bottom below.

Here you will see the sitemap submitted. The status should be pending. From my experience of submitting about 15 plus domain names, Google will download your sitemap within 24-48 hours.

Based on information on your sitemap (about the frequency), Google will regularly crawl over and update your website.

Now some of you may think having Google crawl over to visit your website regularly is great. But always, always try to make sure there is new content being added in. Or there is at least some changes reflected.

I mean you have this important visitor (Googlebot) coming over to inspect your site, so you don’t want to disappoint him with old content. This is important especially when your site is brand-new. Give Googlebot a good impression that “Hey. This website is updated regularly. And the content seems not too bad.” Google will reward you with making sure that searchers will find your website using the keywords you have targeted.

And as you continue to add value to your website, it won’t be long before your website becomes an online authority or trusted source for information.

Let me know if you liked this post and what are other how-tos topics you might be interested in.