Want to get your website listed on the major search engines is no big deal. The hard part is having the whole site indexed correctly.
For a long time the attitude has been "who in the world ever checks out your website's site map?!" The answer is still pretty much no one. No one, that is, but search engine spiders.
Search engines find and index websites by a process akin to calling someone at random and asking them who they know, then asking those people who they know and so on. This process is called "spidering" and as tedious as it sounds, it's here to stay. Liken a site map to handing the search engine spider a phone book when it knocks at your door. The beauty of a site map, rather than a phone book, is that you control what's contained (and what isn't).
There are two kinds of site maps and I recommend you employ both. The first is the traditional HTML site map (JDM example) that is essentially a link list of all your site's pages that are relevant for searching. The second is the xml version which is written in "spider language".
The second "spider language" (or XML language) site map looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<URLSET xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<URL>
<LOC>http://www.justindowneymarketing.com/index.html</LOC>
<LASTMOD>2007-07-12</LASTMOD>
<CHANGEFREQ>monthly</CHANGEFREQ>
<PRIORITY>0.9</PRIORITY>
</URL>
</URLSET>
Before you spend too much time writing this kind of code over for each and every page on your website, check with your web hosting solution. Some of them may have an application that can generate this code for you.
