Some say that site map submission to the search engines is a good idea, others say it's a waste of time. I think it would make sense if you wanted to make sure all your pages got indexed. Google submission process for example says it will take 4-6 weeks to get indexed, YIKES! I heard about a shortcut where you can just do a G search using each url of your individual pages. With any shortcut there's probably disadvantages to this method. Anyone have any info. on this?
Google Sitemaps is a good idea if you have a large content website that is updated with new pages frequently. If your site is static, smaller and easily crawled...it is a waste of time. Never spend money on getting one made for you...it is a simple process that can be easily explained by doing a simple google search.
Sitemaps are still important, they help search engines crawl your sites better. They also give an easy navigation for us humans.
Sitemaps are not a waste of time. Sitemaps help the bots to crawl better. They would crawl your site without a sitemap even, but with a sitemap in place you can make sure that all the files are crawled. Sitemaps can be easily generated. If you have a small site with less than 500 pages, gofor an online tool like - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com If you have a larger one, go for www.gsitecrawler.com - it is an excellent application to generate sitemaps for google as well as yahoo. I did not understand what you said about a shortcut. Please explain.
I read that you can do a shortcut getting indexed in Google by typing in the url and hitting search. If you have "www.mysite.com" that you want G to index for example: Type in "www.mysite.com" as if you were doing a regular web search. I've tried this and it seems to work for getting indexed faster. If you want a page of your site indexed you'de type in "www.mysite.com/page1.html" and do a search. Make sense? I noticed I get indexed in Google within a few days of putting up a new site when I do this. Not sure if it's from typing it in the google search or if the bot just comes and automatically hits your site anyway... In your experience, how long does it usually take to see a new site in Google's index?
Unless your site is large and you're noticing pages that are not being indexed, then having an XML site map won't be necessary. On the other side of the coin, having a regular Web page with a site map is necessary. Given that regular site maps help improve the usabilitly of a Web site for your regular visitors (people) by providing them with another means of navigating through your Web site, it's a no-brainer that the search engnes will follow the site map in the same manner as their fleshy counterparts. Another thing to consider is your navigation structure - do your menus make sense? Are you using semantic markup to structure your Web pages appropriately? If you are, and you're not using JavaScript to make your site's menu (note - using JavaScript to enhance a menu, like the Suckerfish dropdown menu, will not hurt your site's ability to be indexed by search engines, since the menu is nothing but an unordered list - the tiny bit of JavaScript used is an assistive device for Internet Explorer 5/6), you'll most likely be fine.