If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

As hard as it may be to believe Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have come together to make it easier for website owners to make sure their sites are included in the search listings.

The three major players have decided to adopt Google’s Sitemaps protocol which allows website owners to keep Google notified of the pages on their website as well as the pages priority (nothing to do with rankings) and when they are updated. Website owners can also see statistics (from Google) that show when their site was crawled last and other interesting items such as keywords, etc.

“In the first joint and open initiative to improve the Web crawl process for search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft today announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently, resulting in better representation in search indices,” a joint news release said. “For users, Sitemaps enables higher quality, fresher search results.”

The manual Web page submission process supplements the traditional Web crawling and does not automatically guarantee that the pages will be included in a search engine’s index.

Visit Sitemaps.org to learn more about the Sitemaps protocol and how to submit your sitemaps to the various search engines.