Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website - Step 7: Website Submissions

Welcome to part seven in this ten-part search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of human testing. In part seven we will cover the best practices of website submissions, where to submit your website to, and how to do so. With services offering to help you get more traffic and higher search engine positioning by submitting your website to "18 Bazillion Search Engines For Just $19.95 Per Month!" and other such claims, there has grown much confusion around website submissions. In this article we will clear up many of the misconceptions around submitting your website and may even save you "Just $19.95 Per Month!" in the process. Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign. The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are: Content Creation Optimization Then How Do I Submit My Own Website? Automated search engine submission systems simply access the existing and readily accessible "Add URL" pages of the search engines and automatically submit your site. You can do this yourself simply by visiting the search engines and submitting through these same pages. To simplify this process you can visit the "search engines" page on the Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning website (The Submission Myth The truth of that matter is, submitting your website at all can realistically be considered a waste of time. Aside from a few key general directories (DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.) and a number of SEO directories, we did not submit the website www.beanstalk-inc.com to any of the major search engines. It's true, not a single submission. Are we indexed? Yes we are. How did we get indexed without submitting our site? If you take the time that you would be spending submitting your site and spend it instead finding quality inbound links (which we will write about next week) your site will be indexed and much quicker than you think. You've probably heard the term "search engine spider". Search engines crawl websites. This means that they visit a page, follow all the links on that page and so on. If you have a link on a website that is already known to the search engines it is only a matter of time before your website will be found by default. If fact, when the Beanstalk site went live and the first link was established to it, it did not take the weeks that are estimated through the use of the submissions pages for our site to be found. The homepage of beanstalk-inc.com was index by Google three days after the site went live and the other major engines followed within a week or so. Final Notes If there are any points that I hope you take away from this article they are the following: Automated search engine submissions services are not worth the money they charge. You do not need to be submitted to thousands of "search engines". The vast majority of traffic comes from the top few. You will want to consider whether it is even worth the time to submit to search engines or whether that time could be better spent building quality, relevant links to your site and submitting your site to the major and topical directories. An additional failing to the automated submissions systems not covered above is their inability to take into consideration the exact characteristics of your website for their directory submissions. When you're submitting your website to directories you will have to choose the exact category your site falls into. Most directories have slightly different category hierarchies and the more exact you are in your submission, the higher the chance you will be listed. Automated systems can never be as exact across multiple directories as a human can. Submitting your website, even correctly, will not guarantee you top rankings however it will leave you with money in your pocket to spend on other promotional endeavors that may actually produce a solid ROI. And THAT'S what it's all about. The rankings? You'll have to read the other nine steps of the series to find out how to attain those. In part eight of this search engine positioning series we will cover the importance of link building, how to attain high quality, relevant links to your website, and the tools to reduce the time it take to do so significantly. With the importance of inbound links to your overall rankings you won't want to miss this very important step in the website optimization process. Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. One of the few SEO & web design review and