Listen. Some make submitting pages to search engines sound like the fast track to search engine ranking nirvana. Not to mention you'll see offers to submit your site to a scadzillion sites for some low nominal fee.

Yeah right. It's enough to make Pinocchio's nose grow!

Because it's just not true. Basically there are really only three search engines that count. Google snags more than 60% of all searches. Yahoo 23%. While MSN search has less than 10%. Which leaves a bit over 5% for the remaining scadzillions to fight over.

So don't fall for the line those snake oil salesmen would have you believe. You know? That submitting to all known search engines will have the bots lining up like addicts at a methadone clinic to get at your site. With traffic following your high search engine rankings shortly thereafter.

Besides it's not even necessary. Since if you have just one link from a site already in Google or Yahoo those bots will find you. Sooner or later. Making it safe to keep your wallet securely in your pants or purse.

Now I tell you all this knowing there may be one exception. But only for those who insist on submitting out of some sense of leaving no stone unturned.

If that's you, do you know which one page might be the only possible exception to the "It Ain't Necessary to Submit Your Site" rule?

Let me cue up the Final Jeopardy music while you ponder that.

Give up?

Okay, I'm talking about your site map. Reason being your site map points the bots to the promised land of all pages from your site. Or should.

Given that let me make this site map submission thing super quick and easy.

First to insure the bots can't help but find yours, put a link to your site map in the footer of every page on your site. That's right, EVERY page. This way no matter which page the bot lands on first it can't miss your site map. And in turn follow it to all the pages of your site.

But wait. You gotta have a site map to submit a site map, right? Well then, here's a nifty little site map generator that should be good enough to get you started.

http://www.netroglycerine.com/sitemap.html

It gets high marks from me because it works and it is available at no charge.

Here's how it works.

Enter your URL. Click none of the check boxes. Then hit ENTER on your keyboard since there is no start or run key on the page. Then right before your very eyes, in seconds, one general issue site map will appear.

Next "View Source". Cut and paste the code into your page template and away you go. One quick and dirty site map ready for submission. Or you can edit it a tad to clean it up a bit.

Oh and if you aren't enamored with that approach here are some other suggestions. Both free and for fee.

• http://www.site-map.co.uk/build-a-site-map.html using Xenu Link Sleuth

Yahoo http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Anyway, whether you use a tool to shave hours off the process or feel compelled to create your site map by hand, submitting a site map is a once and done deal. Do so and sooner or later a hapless search engine bot will be assigned to check out the page you submitted. When it does it will think it hit web pages paydirt and get busy indexing all pages in your site.

There. Now you know which page, if any, to submit where.

Copyright 2004 John Gergye

About The Author

John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook "Traffic From Google in 35 Days". Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml. Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml/ and get the free special report "Coming Out On Top".