We all want our websites listed with the major search engines. We can all agree that good placement with the search engine drives additional traffic to your website. Many new webmasters may wonder how we do this.

Fishingnw.com is indexed within most major search engines. Listing a basic URL with the major search engines is simple. But what do you do if you want to list your dynamic content? The solution is creating a sitemap in the xml format. This is very similar to an RSS news feed. The .xml also needs to be updated often. If you haven't created a .xml sitemap, now is the time.

We currently found out that we were not listed with Ask.com. Ask.com has been doing some major advertising on television and I would suspect its use will become more common. Listing your website with ask.com is not as straight forward as it should be. Here are the steps we took to list our website.

Ask.com does indeed support sitemaps. Since we have already tackled sitemaps, getting Ask.com to "index" was an easy task once we figured out the trick.

Quote::

Q: Does Ask.com support sitemaps? A: Yes, Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. Once you have prepared the sitemap, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt as follows: EXAMPLE SITEMAP: www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL. Alternatively, you can also submit your sitemap through the ping URL: submissions.ask.com/pi...A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml Please note that sitemap submissions do not guarantee the indexing of URLs. To learn more about the protocol, please visit the Sitemaps web site at www.sitemaps.org.

We chose to ping the sitemap server for each sitemap we have created.

Example - submissions.ask.com/pi...itemap.xml

If you haven't indexed your URL with ask.com, now is the time.

Note - We have completed a similar procedure with google, yahoo, and webcrawler. Information about listing with these search engines is readily available on the net.