Here’s a really quick and easy way to create your first XML sitemap without touching a single line of code! Then, just cause we can, I’ll show you how to make sure ALL search engines not only find your sitemap but ALSO index every page listed there.

Oh.. hold up a second, we ain’t done yet my friend, next I’m going to show you how to QUICKLY and EASILY get your new sitemap pinged buy some of the major players in the pinging world.

And all in under 10 minutes! So lets check it out..You may be asking yourself “what’s the big deal about sitemaps?”, well let me fill you in.

A sitemap gives all search engines a real easy way to find and index all the pages in your site, because we link to them from one place. Now if you’ve been running a site for a few years just imagine how many pages your site contains, is it user friendly to list them all in a navigational bar? Not really, it looks kinda messy and it might slow down your entire site… not a great user experience, right?

So instead we create a sitemap and give that to the search engines, it makes their job easier, lets it crawl your site faster and makes sure more of your site gets found by people searching.

OK so we got that down and know that sitemaps are a pretty cool way of boosting traffic. But what about the robots file I mentioned in the video?

Well I’m glad you.. err.. I.. asked.

Every search engine checks every site for a robots file.. it lets them know which parts of your site it’s OK to index and which parts it’s not. Sometimes you might have areas, such as member profiles, that you don’t really want to be included in the search engine results pages (SERPs), in which case we just tell search engines like Google and Yahoo to stay away from the folder, or directory, where the members profiles are kept.

Now, in the video I showed you how to tell the search engines to definitely include your sitemap (or rather the pages it links to) in their SERPs. With me so far?

Cool.

In the last part of the video I talk about pinging your sitemap. Sounds kinda complicated right? But as you will have seen there’s nothing to it.

This tells OTHER search engines that you have a sitemap and they should be checking it on a regular basis. So does that mean we don’t have to ping them again?

Yup. They will just include your sitemap in their next crawl and index whatever they find in there.

More traffic = more sales. Sweet.

Good luck my friend.