I'll be discussing this more below but I should say here that Google told me you don't have to submit your site URL to Google since Google's bots and spiders are crawling the net 24/7. I don't quite understand why Google told me this when Google's own webmaster guidelines tells webmasters to submit their new URL to Google.For what it's worth, I asked a tech at GigaBlast, a neat little search engine, about search engine submission and he told me it was in the end redundant since you are ebound to get picked up one way or another
Submit your url to Yahoo!
It's number 2 and is giving Google a run for their money in a lot of services besides search that are useful to internet users. You have to sign up. But it's no big deal. It's also free.
Make sure to take a look at Yahoo's info for webmasters while you're there.
Submit your site to MSN Search
MSN has gotten a lot better in the last couple of months. They have really tried to improve their search technology and it looks to me as though they are succeeding. I can say from my experience with MSN lately that they are now in a position to challenge Google for top search engine spot. MSN search results are now more relevant and useful, to me at least, than they have been in the past.
You should also visit MSN's Site Owner Help page for some useful tips for making your site MSN friendly.
Of course the big Kahuna is Google. So if you're going to visit just one of these webmaster tips pages, and make your site friendly to just one search engine, make it Google's.
SEOs
I'll be saying more about this later but I'm not really a fan of Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs). SEOs claim to be able to improve your site's standing with search engines, thereby increasing traffic to your site by "optimizing" your site for search engine crawls and submitting it to search engines repeatedly. Some SEOs are legit and do provide useful services to webmasters. A lot are not and only exist as email harvesters for spamlords.
In my opinion the best thing about SEOs is the free webmaster services, tools, tutorials and links some of them offer. The SEOs whose banners you see below all offer these freebies to webmasters. They're useful if you don't want to submit your new site's URL manually to search engines and go to the bother of learning and working to make your site better, more search engine friendly. They don't do anything in any depth for you but they do give you a place to start with some basic web design, promotion and improvement ideas and concepts. They will help you optimize your site through some basic tutorials about site promotion, HTML and web design, perform basic automated services for you like creating and/or checking your meta-tags for you, seeing whether your links are working and whether your page(s) load too slowly etc. They also point you in the direction of advertising ideas and agencies should you wish to start an ad camnpaign.
All told, it's a pretty good deal for novice webmasters. Usually all they ask in return is that you place a link back to them on your site. I thought it was an equitable exchange. I got some exposure to the many facets of website design and promotion basics and in return I placed links to useful tools and tips for beginner webmasters.
Just below are some of these SEOs. I have used their free services without incident. I suggest you give their free services a try. Their free services do provide valuable insights and info for you to use down the road.
Beware: Some SEOs are are known spammers. Although I had no problems using these SEOs, you might not want to give your primary email address to them if they ask you for it. Set up a web based email account i.e. Yahoo! Mail or HotMail just to be on the safe side.
SEOs will go further than providing various useful links, free automated tools ,site submission and other services for you but it costs money. For a fee - sometimes in the thousands - they will consult more closely, longer and in person with you and give you more detailed advice on how to design, optimize and promote your site so that you reach the audience and get the traffic you want.
You can submit your site to the search engines right here if you want. It's easy. Just type in your site's URL and your email address if you use the yellow box on the right and you're off! You will soon get a large number of emails from the search engines that they have received your URL and some might make you an offer for a paid placement with them. Don't submit your URL more than once though. Redundant submissions are useless and some search engines might penalize you for it.
Keep reading. I discuss search engine submission and SEOs below in more detail.
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Submit your site to 20 popular
Search Engines for FREE!
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While I recommend using the free services and tools that the SEOs offer, I do, for the most part, advise against paying for search engine submission and optimization services. They are just not worth the money. They don't do anything you can't do. They perform a redundant service and, in some cases, use of a SEO can cause more problems than they solve. Let's take a look at some of the drawbacks to employing an SEO.
1) Search engines find your site by crawling links on other websites.
Not only that but as I said above, there are only three search engines worth your time, MSN, Yahoo! and Google. They are used by the vast majority of internet surfers and their indexes are among the largest out there. Google accounts for some 45-50%of the search engine market (In some places it's higher. One study suggests that Google is used by almost 75% of internet surfers), Yahoo! about 30% and MSN around 12%. See this article and this article for details.
If you get listed by just one of these three main search engines you will inevitably be picked up by the other other two big ones and by the many other smaller ones. So don't be too impressed by companies that trumpet their ability to submit your URL to hundreds or thousands of search engines. That includes the meta search engines. Submitting your URL to meta search engines is useless since meta search engines do nothing more than return results coalesced from the major search engines. They do not crawl sites or maintain an index of websites of their own.
2) They sometimes list you on near useless pages known as free for alls (FFAs) which have no ranking with the major search engines. I know this for a fact because I am listed on a few FFAs and half the time Google, MSN and Yahoo don't include them in their search results for PC1Stop.
Not only that but FFAs are feeding grounds for email bots which prowl the net looking for email addresses to target for their masters' spam campaigns.
Worse still is the distinct possibility that your site's placement on a FFA will adversely affect your site's standing with the big search engines, particularly Google.
3) You only need to submit yor site URL one to the search engines. Once your site is listed with a search engine it is a waste of time to keep submitting your URL(s) to it. Search engines rank pages according to a number of criteria. Frequency of submission is not one of them. Furthermore search engines may, in some cases, penalize you for it.
4) No one can can guarantee a #1 ranking on any of the big search engines. This claim is just pure deception. Google's page ranking system is complex, independent, automated and dynamic as are Yahoo!'s and MSN's.
5) There is a very real possibility that you might get burned and wind up delisted from the major search engines indices because the SEO you hired employed unethical tactics (keyword stuffing, creating shadow domains or doorway pages) pushing your site. Unethical SEO tactics like doorways and shadow domains can also sap your site's link popularity and gradually move your site into the farthest peripheries of the net making it unreachable and interesting to a tiny minority of surfers.
6) You don't know for sure what they're doing. They say they're submitting your site every week or so but are they? The way search engines work it's almost impossible to tell.
7) They perform the useless function of "optimizing meta keyword tags". Search engines stopped using meta keyword tags to analyze and rank sites years ago. You're paying good money for nothing.
The only benefit I can see from hiring an SEO, a good one, is that you will get professional advice on how to improve page design, checking your site for improper coding, broken links, bad grammar and spelling, incoherent syntax, sharpening your content to fit the audience you are trying to reach and submitting your site to relevant web directories . But as I said, none of this is beyond your reach as a webmaster. It just takes a little extra effort, thought and attention to achieve everything a good SEO can do for you.
If you are intent on hiring an SEO despite all this then at least avoid SEOs that
- claim to have a special relationship with the major search engines.
- send you unsolicited email/spam
- automate all or most of their services
- Have websites that are not even in the Google index. Just type the URL into the Google search box to find out.
- require you to place a link to their site(s) or their clients' sites in exchange for their services
- can't give you any references from happy customers
- do not distinguish between a listing in the advertising section of the search results (usually to the right or above) and the regular search results. In other words make sure you are not paying merely to be listed in the advertising section unless that is part of the arrangement you have with the SEO. But keep in mind there is a big difference between a high search engine ranking - something prized by webmasters, and being in the advertising section which merely requires a high enough bid.
- say they will submit your site to the top 300, 500, 3,000 or 20,000 search engines and directories. As noted already, there are only three search engines worth your time - MSN Google and Yahoo!. A credible SEO knows that already.
- claim that constantly submitting your site URL to the search engines is necessary to get top rankings. Pure rubbish and they know it.
- refuse to discuss in detail with you the methods and technology they use to promote and optimize your site.
- offer to make you part of their "network of sites". This is just a nice way of saying your site will be added to a bunch of their banner or link farms - useless pages with no content other than hundreds if not thousands of unrelated banners/links some linking to each other, some not. Google tends to frown on sites included in banner/link farms.
For more on SEO fraud and red flags see this article by Joel Walsh, Google's section on SEOs, and Search Engine Guides' Search Engine Submission Services Are a Scam by Scottie Claiborne.
Make sure you follow the link near the bottom to the forum thread in which they prove the futility of search engine submission. I think if you are going to hire an SEO and truly get your money's worth you should concentrate on getting two things from them:
- Tell them up front that you are not interested in their search engine submission services. Tell them instead that you would like them to work to arrange link exchanges with other quality sites that have the same or similar content yours does. If they are not able or willing to do this for you then try another SEO. There are lots of them.
I don't know why more SEOs don't do link exchanges for their customers. If they are going to call themselves Search Engine Optimizers than they should do what it takes to optimize your site for search engines and that means getting your site listed on other sites.
Everybody knows that your standing with the search engines is in large part dependent on the number of sites that link to yours. The more sites that post your URL, the higher your Google Page Rank. Google says so themselves.
- Site improvement.
Take full advantage of their site improvement/enhancements services. A good SEO will make your site attractive to the eye, easy to navigate and ensure that your source code is well written. - If you can afford it and have the inclination, an SEO will organize a Pay- Per Click (PPC) search engine marketing campaign for you. PPC is the most widely used form of advertising on the net. Many companies report great success with PPC advertising.
(I discuss PPC in more detail below)
Of course, you should do your homework before picking an SEO. Take a look at the work they've already done. Ask them for references. Check out the sites they've "optimized". If you're not familiar with this whole SEO thing then do some research on SEOs in addition to reading references from previous customers. Submitting to Directories
If there is one place worth submitting your site, it's directories. Directories are a great place to start promoting your site. Directories are an internet phone book, if you will, an enormous index of sites arranged by category each category broken down into sections, subsections, sub subsections and so on. Directories existed before search engines became popular. Unlike banner/link farms directories are created and maintained for the benefit of the internet community. They are designed to help users find info on the topics they are looking into. Directories come in two flavors, paid and free. Free directories are usually staffed by volunteers so be prepared to wait while and to stick with it if you do submit your site to a free directory. If you've built a quality website it should only be a matter of time before you get listed with the free directory. Directories come in two more flavors - specialized and general. There are Christian directories, New Age directories, Environment directories, Jewish web directories, Business directories, Genealogy and Family History directories etc. etc. You can spend hours if not days in a web directory. Each is a universe unto itself.
Of course, it may sound like a no brainer but don't try to submit your site to a directory that is unrelated or antithetical to the content of your site. You wouldn't for example, submit your Christian site to an adult directory, nor would you submit your Evolution site to a Christian directory. Similarly don't expect much in the way of success if you decide to submit your bird watching site to the Radio directory or your ice skate design site to a search engine directory.
Most directories are powered by humans. They do not collect and categorize sites using spiders. The benefit for you is that your submitted site is less likely to be categorized incorrectly. The downside of course is that no spiders out on the net crawling sites means your site will not be indexed automatically. You will have to submit your site yourself to the directory. But you were prepared to do that any way.
The most popular free directory by far is DMOZ also known as the Open Directory Project. DMOZ is a general directory. It contains millions of sites organized into just about every category imaginable.
Google maintains its own version, of DMOZ, the Google Directory which integrates Google search technology into the index of DMOZ which essentially allows you to search the massive DMOZ index using Google's unparalleled search technology.
I really like Google Directory.
Get yourself listed here. It's free but it's huge and you'll be part of the largest people powered internet directory in the world. They're also looking for editors
Paid Directories
Paid directories are much the same as free directories except that you must pay a certain amount in order to be listed with the paid directory. As with free directories, there is no guarantee you will be listed even though you are prepared to pay for your listing. Make sure you follow the directory's submission guidelines carefully. The two biggest paid directories are Yahoo!, it's huge, and Best of the Web which has been around since the first days of the internet and is still pretty selective about the sites it accepts for inclusion in its directory.
Personally, I don't see the advantage of paying to get your site listed in a directory. The biggest most used directory, DMOZ, is free and 85% of surfers use Google MSN and/or Yahoo! to find what they're looking for out on the net. the rest use Ask or AOL which uses Google search. So why pay to be included in an index used by a tiny minority of internet surfers?
Maybe it's a prestige thing.
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