Do you create XML sitemaps for Google and submit it regularly? I do it for most of my blog and sites. But do you also submit the same sitemap to Live Search (MSN) too? If not, start doing it from today. It really helps.

I recently did a simple study with live search sitemap. I have a site which has around 3,000 pages. I submit my sitemap to Google and Yahoo regularly. Google sends around 140,000 visitors per month. Yahoo sends around 20,000 visitors per month. Live/MSN was used to send only around 3,000 visitors.

I also checked number of pages listed in various search engines. Google lists around 2,500 of these 3000 pages. Yahoo lists only 560 pages (I don’t know why so less). I also checked with MSN/Live, it listed only 280 of my pages.

Then I submitted my sitemap (same one which I submit to Google) to Live.com. After 15 days, today, I checked the stats. Now live is having around 2,500 of my pages listed. Wow! Does it also increased my traffic? I checked the stats. Yes, it does.

I used to get around 3,000 visitors per month from Live. But this month till June 22^nd I have already received 11,000 visitors from Live (and MSN as shown by awstats). I submitted the sitemap to Live.com on 6th of this month only. So just this one step of submitting my sitemap has increase the traffic from Live/MSN to 4 times. Wow! Now I need to do it for all of my sites.

So, here is the moral of the story: Do submit your sitemap to live.com as well.