Anyone that has owned a website for some time or is involved in promoting their website will probably know all about submitting sitemaps to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

A sitemap is essentially a list of URL’s or web pages of a particular site laid out in a format that tells search engines what pages there are in the site.

This saves the search engines the time required to look through all the links of a site before it finds all the pages. This can help speed up the indexing of new pages and pages that change on a regular basis.

It has recently become much simpler to make search engines aware of your sitemap due to an agreement between the major players in the industry.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html

All webmasters need to do now is reference the location of their sitemap in the robots.txt file.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/  is a good place to look if you are not familiar with robots.txt files.

If your sitemap location is http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml,  in your robots.txt file you simply need to add:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

That’s it.

According to the Yahoo Search Blog as referenced above, the major search engines will now all recognise this as a valid instruction.

So far it looks like the following Search Engines are onboard: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, IBM

One of the best free xml sitemap generators I have used can be found here:

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

It uses java so you may need to update the Java on your PC but you will be prompted if you do.