It was not long ago that major internet players Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! agreed on a common sitemap protocol. This allowed webmasters to provide an XML file indicating the structure of the Website.

One of the problems with sitemaps was that you needed to submit it to each search engine separately. For Google, this meant creating your own Webmaster tools account and then adding your sitemap XML there. With so many search engines out there it was a chore.

But not anymore! Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo! again joined hands to enable something called auto discovery of sitemaps. You just need to add a reference to the sitemap in robots.txt and all the search engines will automatically pick that up! Now that is what I call a cool idea!

In your robots.txt file, just add
Sitemap: http://www.yousitedomainname.com/sitemap.xml