You will have to visit the google sitemaps page  and the Yahoo Site Explorer page to register and upload your information.  Once registered you are able to submit new "maps" of information to the spiders telling them to come and "fetch" your content.

The easiest way to do this is via a simple text files with all the URLs noted, line by line.  This is the most basic implementation and is stable and easy to understand.  Add a new page?  Add a new line in your text file.

The limitation is that this does not "push" your content to the search engines.  To do this you require an XML feed.  Here's an example using google, although Yahoo! has a similar service.:

In order to make this happen you have to:

1.  Create a file noting the URL's to update in a special format and save this file to the root directory of your server.

2.  Log in to the google sitemaps webpage and insert the URL of your file.

The google spider then will visit this file, determine which pages need to be updated in the index based on the LastModified tag, and make the changes.  

Here's a basic sitemap code, step by step...

1.  Copy the following text into notepad: (right-click and select all..)

You can change the code to include the actual URL's for your website.  To add more URL's simply copy another line of code for each page, example:

Change the date to today's date.  Save on your desktop as googlesitemap.xml  and then upload via File, Import into the root directory  (where you can see the default page).

You could also open up FrontPage, in the root web (where you can see the default page) File, New, Page, it will open a new HTML page.  Click on HTML view on the bottom and select all, removing all of the text. 

Copy the updated text from your clipboard with your own URL's and save as:

googlesitemap.xml 

You could also create the file on the local computer in notepad and upload via File, Import.  This will work with any web editor.

To test file you can then load  www.yourdomain.com/googlesitemap.xml in your browser. If all is good you should see a listing the the urls you want "spidered" by google.

You then simply have to visit the googlesitemaps page, login and enter the  www.yourdomain.com/googlesitemap.xml  into the form, click submit, and if all is good you get a confirmation and a ticking clock; you can login and see the progress of your request.  Very cool and very functional for up-to-the-minute updates, my first time update took less than an hour to be processed.

Of course the next time you are updating your site and want the pages to appear faster you have to update the XML file with the new URL's and visit the sitemaps website and insert your www.yourdomain.com/googlesitemap.xml  URL, prompting the spider to come your way once again.

Your first time is scary  It may freak you out to request an update from google. You are worried that you may do something wrong and lose all your rankings....  Don't worry; as long as your content is good and the update schedule is valid; the search engines WANT to know when you have new content; it make's their job easier.

To test; after the update has been processed, do a site:yourdomain.com search on google, you should see all of your pages spidered; including the most recently updated ones. You can get fancy in you coding and add more tags for frequency, pagerank, etc.   This is difficult to implement manually since you are always updating a text file.  Would'nt it be easier if the file was updated automatically?   Ahhh... so that's why you use XML..... You can also purchase special add-ons and programs to create these files for you or you can do a search; there are many webpages that will spider your site and send you the code required to create a valid sitemap. I am sure that this is a feature that will be included in many web editors in the future and we see the day when we are creating different files for each search engine.  This does make sense in some cases, depending on the content. Good luck with your website and thanks for visiting...