Submitting your sitemap - Now we turn to the active submission of your site map to the major search engines (the modern equivalent of old-fashioned search engine submission). Over time, all the search engines will move toward the Sitemaps.org standard for submission, which is to use a ping URL submission syntax. Basically this means you give your sitemap address to the search engine and request it to send out a short burst of data and “listen” for a reply, like the echo on a submarine sonar search. At time of writing, I only recommend using this method for Ask.com. Amend the following to add the full URL path to your sitemap file, copy it into your browser URL bar, and hit return:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Ask.com will present you with a reassuring confirmation page, then crawl your sitemap file shortly thereafter. MSN has yet to implement a formal interface for sitemap submission. To monitor the situation, visit the LiveSearch official blog (at http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch) where future improvements are likely to be communicated. However, for the time being I recommend undertaking
two steps to ensure that MSN indexes your site:

• Reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file (see above).
• Ping Moreover using http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml.

Moreover.com is the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN portal, so I always work on the (probably erroneous) theory that submission to Moreover may somehow feed into the main MSN index somewhere down the track. (RSS is sometimes called Really Simple Syndication and supplies “feeds” on request from a particular site, usually a news site or a blog, to a news reader on your desktop, such as Google Reader.) Both Google (which originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps) and Yahoo! offer dedicated tools to webmasters, which include both the verification of site ownership and submission of sitemaps:

To use Google Webmaster Tools, you must first obtain a Google account (something I cover in more detail in the section on Adwords, page 187). You then log in, click on “My Account,” and follow the link
to Webmaster Tools. Next, you need tell Google all the sites you own and begin the verification process. Put the URL of your site (e.g., http://www.g-excess.com) into the Add Sites box and hit return.

Google presents you with a page containing a “next step” to verify your site. Click on the Verify Site link and choose the “Add a Metatag” option. Google presents you with a unique meta tag, in the following
format: <meta name=“verify-v1” content=“uniquecode=” />

Edit your site and add the verification meta tag between the head tags on your homepage. Tab back to Google and click on the Verify button to complete the process. Now you can add your sitemap by clicking on the sitemap column link next to your site. Choose the “Add General SiteMap” option and complete the sitemap URL using the input box. You’re all done! Yahoo! follows a similar approach to Google on Yahoo! Site Explorer. Sign up, sign in, add a site, and click on the verification button. With Yahoo! you need to upload a verification key file (in HTML format) to the root directory of your web server. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo! to start authentication. This takes up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the “Manage” button and adding the sitemap as a feed. 

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