Search Engines
Getting our website’s presence established on the Web is our primary goal when we open up a business. As long as we’re invisible, we’re not going to get traffic…and no traffic means no sales! And unfortunately, many new website owners are under the false impression that once they build a website, they are automatically visible and listed in the search engines. They then sit around waiting and wondering about website traffic that never seems to come. So one of the things you can do as online business owners is submit your site to the top search engines.
Submitting your site to the top search engines is a free process, but it can also be time-consuming. So there are a lot of websites out there offering to tackle this task for you for a fee. If you really just don’t want to deal with it yourself, there is nothing wrong paying someone else to do submissions for you. But don’t fall for the folks that tell you they submit to “thousands” of search engines. Read on for more information about the SE submission process.
- 80-90% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing) and their related portals (AOL gets its results from Google). Out of the remaining true search engines, none can account for even 1% of all traffic generated by a search engine query. So really, why would you need to be listed in their index?
- Google, Yahoo, and MSN will often find your site on their own if it’s linked to another website that is already in their indexes (This is why Link Building is so important!). Submitting to them does not guarantee that you will get indexed any faster. It doesn’t hurt to let alert the SE’s about your new site though–as long as you don’t do it too often–but in and of itself it’s not enough to get you listed.
- Most sites that offer submission services use software made for this purpose. What they usually neglect to tell you though is that search engines usually reject any submissions by automated software. But even the smaller SE’s that do allow automatic submissions don’t get good traffic themselves, so you don’t want to be listed with them anyway.
- Many automated submission services are nothing more than email list marketers. You pay for their “submission” service and provide your email address, so you just end up buying yourself a lot of spam.
- Many of the search engines now regularly ban websites that get submitted to their indexes too often, because they consider it to be spamming. So if you’re using a service that promises to submit your site every month, or every 3 months etc, then you run the very real risk of not only NOT getting indexed, but also being completely banned from the search engines. And that’s definitely not a good way to get traffic!
If you’d like to do the submissions yourself, here are some links to the top search engines that should help you start to make your presence known on the web. Just be sure to read each SE’s guidelines for submissions, especially noting how often you can submit. Each SE has its own guidelines for frequency of submission, so follow each one. It’s also recommended to set yourself up with a free email account via Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail, and use that email address when you do your submissions with sites that request one. Some of the SE submissions will generate SPAM, so having the free email account will at least keep all of that out of your primary email’s inbox.
