Submit Your Site – Fact or Myth?

Submit Your Site – Fact or Myth?
Author: Tracy Fredrychowski

You have probably seen the adverting e-mails that promise to Submit Your Site to 1000 Search Engines for a one time fee of $69.95.

Statistics* show that 43.7% of searchers use Google, 28.8% use Yahoo!, 12.8% use MSN/Live and the remaining 14.7% use other search engines and directories. So shouldn’t we wonder what the reasoning behind the ad Submit your site to 1000 Search Engines is?

Around 1995 the Internet started to really take off. In 1995 according to Internet World Stats there where 16 million Internet users. In 2007 they state that there are over 1,129 million users. So in all reality it may have been important in the early days to submit your site to 1000 search engines, but in today’s world if the majority of Internet users are only using the 3 top search engines doesn’t it make more sense to concentrate on the search engines people are using.

Here is something very interesting that you may not know. Leading Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) Professionals never submit a Web site to a search engine. That’s right they let the search engines find their site through other methods.

Professional SEO’s concentrate on:

Submitting to the most influential directories on the Internet. Google has even gone as far as to put a list together of the directories they find the most important. (You can find that list on The Workshop Resource Center).

Feeding the search engines a good quality site map that the engines can use to index all pages of a Web site.

Submitting to a search engine through a Paid Inclusion Program.

Link reputation and work on building quality in-bound links.

Never using submission software.

Part of the job of a Professional SEO is to spend time keeping up to date with any changes on the leading search engines and directories. SEO's watch closely what Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live have to say and if they find through their research that indexing happens quicker by not submitting a site then wouldn’t we want to follow their lead.

Time and research shows us that the days of submitting our sites to over 1000 search engines is long gone. SEO Professionals advise us that if we want to spend $69.95 then spend that money on submitting your site to one of the leading directories. One of the directories that Google suggest we submit to Goguides.org and their submission fee just happens to be $69.95.

*comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings

Tracy Fredrychowski – SEO Instructor
CEO of the Search Engine Academy of SC
Tracy teaches Search Engine Marketing and Optimization throughout South Carolina. The Search Engine Academy of SC holds workshops in Greenville, Columbia and Charleston.