Five Common Myths About
Search Engine Submission
By
Donald Nelson, copyright 2006
Search engine
submission is a matter that often mystifies those who are new
to the Internet. It is natural to scratch your head and wonder
how you will get your website listed on the major search
engines. If you ask someone how to go about getting your site
listed you are likely to hear many misconceptions about search
engine submission. You may even be taken for a ride and end up
needlessly parting with some hard earned cash. So, before this
happens to you let’s examine some of the most common myths
surrounding search engine submission.
1. Search Engine Submission is a Very Important Matter
It would indeed seem that you submitting your site to the
search engines is of utmost importance. After all, if your
site is not in the search engines then how will anybody find
you? Sure, you have to be included in the search engines but
that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have to actively
“submit” your site. This is because search engines use their
“spiders”, or robotic search programs to scour the Internet
looking for new pages. If another site, that is already
included in the search engines, links to yours, then when a
search engine spider visits that site, it will follow the link
to your site and gather your information.
So, if you are building a new site make sure that you get some
links to your sites from already established sites. Ask your
webmaster, your friends, other organizations and complementary
sites for links. This will be enough to get you listed in the
major search engines. You may still want to submit your site
to make sure, but consider the other points before you go
ahead
2. There are thousands of search engines that you should be
listed in
“Get listed in 300,000 search engines” read the headlines for
some submission advertisements. If you look at the traffic
logs of most websites you will see that the lion’s share of
traffic comes from a handful of search locations, such as
Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. There just aren’t thousands
of search sites on the Internet. So, don’t pay money to be
listed on these sites. Oftentimes, the sites referred to in
these advertisements are seldom-visited free-for-all links
pages. If you get listed on such a page you will not get much
traffic, but you will get a lot of spam.
Concentrate on the major search engines and don’t worry about
the non-existent phantoms referred to in the advertisements.
3. Monthly submission to search engines is a must
In the early days of the Internet, the companies that handled
search engine submission warned the public that sites can be
easily lost from search engine indexes and that to prevent
this from happening it is important to resubmit your site
every months. They also said that this was a good way to let
search engines know about new additions to your pages.
It is not very likely that your site will disappear from a
search engine for no reason at all. If your site is “down” for
a considerable amount of time then it might be possible for
your site to be dropped from the listings, but otherwise this
rarely happens.
Also, you don’t have to resubmit your site to notify search
engines about changes to your page or pages. The spiders of
search engines regularly revisit pages that are already in the
index. You can in fact create a “robots” meta tag and give
instructions such as “revisit every 15 days” and this will
accomplish the job better than a resubmission.
4. Automatic submissions are useless and you must submit
manually
There is often a hot debate about whether manual submissions
are better than automatic submissions. For Yahoo, MSN and
Google it is now better to do it with a manual submission
because all of these engines require you to fill in a code
word that is displayed on the screen. These search engines
instituted this procedure to block out automated spam
submissions. So, for the giants of search, manual submission
is the way to go.
What about the secondary sites? There are smaller search
engines and directories. Some of them can be useful to you,
especially if they represent a particular geographic area or
business niche that you are aiming for. If the list of these
secondary engines and directories becomes too large, then you
may want to consider automated submission. There are some
programs that do this or you can find submission services that
are free or inexpensive, which brings us to the last myth.
5. You should be prepared to spend a lot of money to get
proper submission
If you look at the first point you will see that you probably
don’t have to do any submission at all to get your site listed
in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. These are the search
engines that will provide you with 90% of your visitors. So,
do you really want to spend a good amount of money to reach
the last 5 or 10 per cent of your possible visitors? Look
around for a free or inexpensive service to take care of the
secondary search engines, and if there are smaller search
engines that are very important to your business, then visit
them yourself and submit your listing. Save your money for
other important tasks.
Donald
Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has
been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the
director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com),
a firm providing low cost search engine optimization,
submission and web promotion services.
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