The team at Yahoo! announced yesterday that they've taken steps to make it even easier for small businesses to authenticate their site and setup full access with Yahoo!'s Site Explorer.

Yahoo! Small Business just made it easier for customers to submit and authenticate their sites to Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, all you have to do is make sure that 'sitemap.xml' is enabled and your site will be submitted to Yahoo! Site Explorer automatically.

With this feature, new stores as well as existing stores with 'sitemap.xml' enabled will have access to the toolkit inside Site Explorer. Within a few hours of enabling, you'll be able to locate your indexed pages and the links to your sites, as well as delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs. To double check if your site was auto-authenticated, take a look in the 'Source' column in the 'My Sites' page in Site Explorer.

Not familiar with Site Explorer or Site Maps? They're basically a set of simple tools Yahoo! has put together to help you gain more information about which pages of your site Yahoo! has indexed, which sites links to you and even which pages of your site are the most popular. If you aren't already using it, it's a great way to get solid information about your site.

Since Yahoo! has made it even easier to authenticate your site (which gives you access to more information), it's a good time to go check things out.