Tip - place your sitemap.xml file in your robots.txt file

All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our suggestion board. We took the idea to Google and Microsoft and are happy to announce today that you can now find your sitemaps in a uniform way across all participating engines. To do this, simply add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Learn more ...
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html/

Scratching my head on XML sitemaps again. Yes I've written them before, but now am writing a little script to automate the process. (Remember ... it's all about automation & making your life easier)

What it is?

A Google sitemap is a file which contains URLs and some additional information for all public pages or documents of your website.

So here's a quick update, a so called 'cheat cheet' for Google sitemaps. These links should get you started in the right direction.

Make sure you have a Google Webmaster Tools account

Here's a recent FAQ post from Google Webmaster blog on sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/01/sitemaps-faqs.html

Sitemap protocol
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

Validating your XML sitemap
http://www.w3.org/2001/03/webdata/xsv

Nice & simple class for creating xml sitemaps with PHP
http://www.idealog.us/2006/09/php_class_for_c.html

Gracias!