St. Thomas SEO

You will see a lot of services out there that will submit your site to the search engines for free and then they offer to sell you a service where they submit your site to the search engines every month for X amount of dollars.

The question is should you pay to have your site submitted to the search engines every month?

The answer to this is, only if it is 1999 or 2000. This method helped back in the day but now there is no advantage to submitting to search engines repeatedly. As a matter of fact with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) if it is done too often your site will actually be flagged for spamming the search engine.

What’s that you say? You aren’t worried about it because the service is submitting your site to thousands of search engines.

Yes, they are submitting to thousands but if you want to get visitors to your site from the search engines there are four you need to concentrate on.

Google – 72% of US Searches in Feb 2009
Yahoo! – 17% of US Searches in Feb 2009
MSN – 5.5% of US Searches in Feb 2009
ASK – 3.7% of US Searches in Feb 2009

Do the math that is 98.2% of all searches done in the US are done on 4 search engine the other 1.8% is divided between thousands of other search engines (actually only about 46 of them made the report). Where do you think you are going to get visitors from?

Just incase you think I made up these numbers you can check them at HitWise

Does this mean that you should not submit to the thousands of search engines that are available?

No go ahead and submit to them if they are indexed you should at least get a backlink from them but I wouldn’t count on too much traffic.

But once you have submitted to a search engine and you are listed there, submitting again IS NOT going to improve your position in the search results, no matter how many times you submit.

For the last five or six years I haven’t even submitted a site to the search engines. The search engines actually prefer to find the links with their spiders that are out scouring the internet. The reason for this is that they assume that a link to a site isn’t an attempt to spam the search engine. When I have a new site I want to get indexed I put a link to the new site on one of my already established sites that I know the search engine spiders visit on a regular basis. This get my new site indexed usually in a day or two, sometimes as fast as an hour (rarely but it has happened).

What do you do if you don’t have an already established site?

In this situation you can create a lens at Squidoo or a page at Hubpages and have a link from there to your new site. This doesn’t work as well as having your own site linking back to you but it does get you indexed in Google in usually less than one week. Remember if you do this don’t create the page (or lens) and only put one link on it back to your site add some content that might be of value to the reader because this page or lens will be there for ever and will reflect your site in some way.

You can also submit to directories and submit articles to get links back to your site. The more links you have, formatted the right way, the better your search engine ranking will be.