Registering Your Listings Sitemap

While all the other content on your site should be easily visible to search engines, the listings are hidden behind the search form, preventing search engines from crawling them.

Gondola for Real Estate provides a sitemap for all the active listings on your site, allowing search engines to index lots of additional pages (one for every listing) on your site. The increase in indexed pages coupled with the great keywords within the pages are often quite a boost to search engine rankings, improving your SEO.

Your sitemap lives on your domain at /listings/sitemap.xml. For example, if your site was gondolacms.com, you could find your sitemap at http://gondolacms.com/listings/sitemap.xml.

Google

To submit your site to Google, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools. Add your site and then choose to verify it via one of the following methods:

• Meta tag: This can be added to your base.html or content/home.html templates. If you are unsure about how to edit your templates, your web designer should be able to make this change quickly.
• Add a DNS record: This is a simple change that can be made at your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc.)

Once you’ve verified your site, simply add a sitemap and wait for Google to index it.

Bing

Submit your sitemap to www.bing.com/webmaster/WebmasterAddSitesPage.aspx (requires Windows Live account).

Yahoo!

Click on Submit Site Feed on siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit (requires Yahoo! account).