I was poking around the net yesterday, looking to see how to submit my sitemap (generated using the excellent sitemap generation tool available from enarion.net) to Ask, when I discovered (in their FAQs) a technique for Sitemaps Autodiscovery. Which is a cool feature of the new sitemaps protocol. Add this line to your robots.txt file:

SITEMAP: http://www.yoursite.com/path-to-your-sitemap.xml

and any spiders that support the sitemap protocol will know where to find the fruits of your sitemap labor. Now I know as well as anyone that Google rules the roost in terms of generating search engine traffic, and managing google's use of your sitemap is pretty straightforward using the Google Webmaster Tools, but there are always new search engines popping up and getting in on their action can still generate some traffic. It's especially cool to do so with a with a passive technique like this.

When you've got definite traffic goals for a site (as I do here) every little bit helps.

What I still can't figure out is how to get MS's Live Search to use the damned thing. Maybe this is the technique? They support the sitemaps protocol but, the last time I checked, there was no way to point them towards the document.