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Submit Your Website To Search Engines

The Sitemap protocol provides an automatic way to submit your website to search engines such Google, Yahoo!, Live Search and Ask at once.
You first have to create an .xml sitemap file for your website, locating it at the "root level" of your Web site. This is an XML file, in the Sitemaps.org protocol format, that contains information about all the pages on your site. It is important to update and change your sitemap file whenever you create new pages or change the content of your current pages. This tells the SE spiders to "come and get" all your pages and update their indexes with your new, edited, and deleted pages.(If you are using Site Build it! it automatically creates this sitemap for you, keeps it updated as you build your site and submits it to the search engines when needed. If you are using any other host and software you will have to create this yourself or have it created. Just do a search for 'create xml sitemap' and there are a few places that will do it for free.)
Why Is the Sitemap Important?
The sooner the SEs know about your pages, the sooner they come and spider them. The sitemap file alone doesn't guarantee that the spiders will come sooner or often, though. You need to constantly rebuild the xml sitemap and ping each search engine when you do. (Site Build it! does all this for you automatically)
The sitemap file does not guarantee that the engines will index all your pages. Nor will it influence rankings for your keywords at any of the SEs. High rankings depend on the delivery of great content pages with properly positioned keywords.
The SEs love sitemap files because they know that a human (not one of those oversubmitting bots that submit tons of engine spam) had to place that XML file at the root level of your Web site. Human submissions have great credibility.
So here is how to submit your xml map to the search engines:
Google
Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
You will need a Google Login and email address.Just submit the file name of your site.
Choose to submit your sitemap and follow the directions.You can also take some extra steps and verify your site with Google. It is all outlined in the webmasters section.
Yahoo!
Go to:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

and enter the URL of your SiteMap in the "Submit Site Feed" box.

Then ping Yahoo through your browser by putting the following code in front of the complete address of you xml sitemap like so replacing your site and file name at the end where indicated.

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=

and then add the url for your site map to create one long string of text.
Ex: Add this : http://www.yoursiteher.com/yourfilename.xml to the end of the textstring above. ( I couldn't put it together as it made my page too wide!)

Ask.com

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.example.com/sitemap.xmlGoogle

Live
Create a manual ping by placing this code in your browser and clicking enter:

http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://yourdomain.com/sitemapname.xml

Be sure to make sure there are no extra spaces in the manual ping and make sure you have the file name right.

Important:The sitemap file does not guarantee that the engines will index all your pages. Nor will it influence rankings for your keywords at any of the SEs. High rankings depend on the delivery of great content pages with properly positioned keywords.

Note: Yahoo!, and occasionally Ask, sometimes has problems with this process. Yahoo! will give you an error message instead of a success message after pinging. This is a problem at Yahoo!'s end. Your only option is to continue pinging, about once a day or so, until you see the success message. The same holds true for Ask. And Ask visits the sitemap file very irregularly. It could be a month or more before the initial visit.

Now that you have notified the search engines the spiders should be coming to scan your site and find all of your pages. They look for pages that contain high quality content and are optimized with keywords.