The Reality of Search Engine Submissions

Over the last few months, search engine submissions have changed dramatically. Now is the time to analyze the way we're submitting our Web pages and to rethink our submission strategies. Regretfully, I still see people paying big bucks to search engine submission services who will submit their pages to thousands of search engines for one "low price." What they aren't told is that the act of "submitting" their pages has nothing to do with top search engine rankings. Even taking a step back, submitting doesn't guarantee indexing. Fact: The majority of traffic to your site will come from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! search engine, and MSN. Therefore, submitting to "thousands" of search engines really isn't doing your site any good. Let's take a serious look at the reality of search engine submissions. Do we need to pay a submission service to submit our pages to the search engines? Can the search engines find our pages on their own, or do we have to pay them to index our pages? Let's look at the variables and try to save you some money. Search Engine Submissions . . . Ways to Submit Your Pages 1. Don't submit! Let the search engines find your pages through links on other Web pages or Web sites. To be honest, this is my favorite, most "stress-free" way to submit to the search engines. Think about it. You create your Web page and optimize it. You make sure to link TO the page from another page on your site, such as your site map. The idea is that when the search engine spiders your site map, it should find the link to your new page, visit the page, spider it, and index it. Can I guarantee it will happen? Of course not. That's why you need to monitor your spider traffic and your rankings to make sure that the page makes it into the search engine's index. Search engine spiders were created to SPIDER the Web. That's their "job" -- to crawl the Web and index new pages. I have always found this method of "submitting" to be the most effective. Submit pages through free add URL pages at the various search engines. My main concern here is that the search engines have always said that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. I have never wanted my submissions to be lumped in there with all of that spam. Therefore, I personally stay away from free add URL pages. In particular, I never submit to Google through its free add URL page. Use Overture's Site Match to submit to Yahoo!'s family of search engines. Overture's Site Match (http://dmoz.org). Then, spend some time finding a few sites that will agree to put links on their sites to yours. Are there any vertical search engines and directories in your topic area? Visit Search Engine Guide and search through their topical search engine directory: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) in locations across North America. She also teaches online SEO training (http://www.searchengineacademy.com) Sign up for SEO tips of the day at