One website, three search engines, dozens of target keyword phrases and a limited number of documents with which to make a difference. A technique that works well with MSNLive might not work well at Google or Yahoo. The client, who measures expectations by what he or she can see, is waiting for their site to appear, attract attention and start converting. They are often unconvinced by thinking that sacrifices placements on one engine for others perceived to be of higher value, especially when they are long-term users of the one being sacrificed.

This is one of the challenges facing search engine optimizers when working to get great organic placements. These things take time, and in previous years, much of that time was spent waiting for spiders to show up and record the SEO’s work. Old-time SEOs can all remember trying to professionally explain the spider-cycle while only “mostly-understanding” it themselves.

The development of Google Sitemaps took all of the guesswork out of getting content into Google’s index. The XML sitemap acts as both an updater and a scheduler, saving Google a great deal of resources by feeding Google scheduled updates and inviting Googlebot on a scheduled basis. Sitemaps are basic common sense on any number of levels. That they grant permission-based access to site content will undoubtedly benefit Google in the future. Google Sitemaps marked an important stage in the evolution of common sense content submission.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google announced a common acceptance of Google’s Sitemap protocol at WebmasterWorld’s Las Vegas Pubcon. A new website, Sitemaps.org, explains pretty much everything one wanted to know about creating and deploying sitemaps.

No extra work will be required from webmasters and SEO firms already using Google Sitemaps, at least not in relation to that particular XML file. The only thing that will change is that the site-feed will now be read by MSN and Yahoo. One still has to work to get the placements and some sense of sacrifice might still be required but living on the spider-cycles of the three largest search engines is now a thing of the past. Sharing common sense is good. Helping everyone benefit from it is better.