As a website operator it is important to have your pages "indexed" by the search engines.   It is strongly recommended that you submit your websites to both of the resources listed below if you want to be included in google and Yahoo!

It's also important for the search engines to deliver timely results.

The results displayed can be outdated in a heartbeat, and new sites want to be indexed quickly.  News, content and blog sites may do daily updates, but sometimes their pages do not appear in the search results for a month or more.  

So how do you as the website owner tell the search engines that you have new content?  Simple (thanks to google...) google Sitemaps .  Yahoo has launched a similar program: Yahoo! Site Explorer .  These files in your website root directory tell the search engines which content to look at, similar to robot.txt files.

As a webmaster when google announced this service I was very excited and wanted to get going right away.  But once I logged in I found that I pretty much had to install python on my server, something I was not willing to do since use a Windows 2000 server platform.  Per the FAQ's on the site it was clear as mud since at the time I did not know much about XML.

There were websites offering to spider me for free and send a copy of the results via email, etc... or applications and add in's to make this happen, but after looking at it for awhile I realized that a simple text file would do the trick.  Not fancy, but easy; just the way I like it.

It's surprisingly easy and took a few minutes, something I would like to show you how to do.

This document assumes you are using a Windows platform on the server and perhaps running FrontPage or a similar editor on your local machine. 

So this is how you create a quite google or Yahoo sitemap in the time it takes to drink a coffee...
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