Search engine submission services promise to submit clients’ websites to thousands of search engines for one low price. But should you trust them?

Emails such as this often appear in my inbox:

“Submitting your website to search engines may increase your online sales dramatically. lf you invest time and money into your website, you simply must submit your website to search engines, otherwise it will be virtually invisible to prospective customers. If you want people to know about your website and boost your sales, the only way to do that is to make your website visible in places where people search for information, such as search engines”.

What you aren’t told in these misleading emails is that submitting your website to search engines has very little to do with search engine rankings. In fact, submitting your website to search engines doesn’t even guarantee it gets indexed. Most traffic to your website is generated from the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Therefore, submitting your website to thousands of search engines will be a waste of time and money. Even worse is that your website might get accidentally submitted to AFF websites, which almost certainly guarantees that it will be banned from search engines. Rather than push you up the rankings, thousands of these search engines use your information for future promotions – meaning more pesky spam crammed in your inbox.

Ways to submit your pages

1. Don’t submit your pages at all. Instead, allow the search engines to find your pages through links on other websites. Ironically, non-submitting is by far the most effective way of submitting your pages – and the least stressful!

2. Submit your pages through the free add URL pages of the search engines. The downside with this, however, is that search engines claim that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. And you don’t want your website lost with all that lot!

3. Use Overture’s Site Match to submit your pages to Yahoo!’s family of search engines. Site Match is a paid inclusion-and cost-per-click program that ensures your pages are highly visible by including them in search engines such as Yahoo!, FAST, AltaVista, HotBot and more. Site Match can get expensive though if you have a number of pages to submit.

4. If your website is new list it in a directory such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) or the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). Then find some websites that will agree to put links from theirs to yours. Visit the Search Engine Guide (www.searchengineguide.com) to see if there are any search engines and directories that cover your website’s topic area.

Take the stress-free approach to search engine submissions and:

• link to all of your important pages from another page on your website
• get inbound links from another website to yours
• let the major search engines find your pages by themselves
• monitor your progress

Please note: You may be using an SEO company like Smart Media to handle your search engine submissions. Does this mean you’re paying too much for these SEO services? No. SEO work is extremely complex and time-consuming, and a good search engine optimiser will help make your online business a success.

In conclusion

So many website owners and SEOs make search engine submissions look much harder than they are. Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes!

Regards

Wolfgang Brand