SEO Speedwagon

If you've had a backstage pass to the SEO Speedwagon for the last few months, you should know by now that we are official groupies for the Sitemaps Protocol. In fact, if we ever take SEO Speedwagon on tour, Sitemaps Protocol would open up for us.

There actually was some interesting news this week re: the Sitemap Protocol.

1. Ask.com has drank the kool-aid so you can now share your sitemap with them.

2. Although MSN isn't "...ready to consume sitemaps just yet", all three major engines announced the sitemap protocol will now include Autodiscovery.

Autodiscovery allows site owners to add a link to their sitemap within their robots.txt file. Here is what it should look like:

Sitemap: [sitemap URL here]

We highly recommend that you add this line to your robots.txt, especially since you will not have to resubmit your sitemap file when it is updated (which should be often if your site content is dynamic).

If you are a fan of the statistics, etc. provided by Google Webmaster Tools, then also be sure to submit your sitemap there. Along with statistics, you will also be able to see if there are any errors in your sitemap which can be very important, especially for large web sites (trust me.....been there).

SEO Humor:

An SEO guy walks into a bar and asks the bartender, "Can you submit a sitemap to MSN?" The bartender looks at him, scratches his head, and asks, "Why?"