Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! finally all use the same autodiscovery method for your website’s sitemap. Since you should already be using a robots.txt file (right?) to tell search engines where and where not to index, all you have to do place the location of your sitemap file at the top of the robots file in this format:

“Sitemap: http://egonitron.com/sitemap.xml”

Without the quotes, obviously. Take a look at my robots.txt file to see how it’s done. Make sure you add a blank line after this line before you start the rest of the instructions.

Haven’t created a sitemap yet? If you use Wordpress, go download and install the Google Sitemaps Plugin. Otherwise, take a look at Google’s list of third-party sitemap generators.