Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website - Step Seven ? Website Submissions

Welcome to part seven in this ten-part search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of human testing. In part seven we will cover the best practices of website submissions, where to submit your website to, and how to do so.

With services offering to help you get more traffic and higher search engine positioning by submitting your website to "18 Bazillion Search Engines For Just $19.95 Per Month!" and other such claims, there has grown much confusion around website submissions. In this article we will clear up many of the misconceptions around submitting your website and may even save you "Just $19.95 Per Month!" in the process.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. Keyword Selection
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/keywords.htm)

2. Content Creation
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/content.htm)

3. Site Structure
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/structure.htm)

4. Optimization
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/optimization.htm)

5. Internal Linking
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/internal-linking.htm)

6. Human Testing
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/human-testing.htm)

7. Submissions

8. Link Building

9. Monitoring

10. The Extras

Step Seven ? Website Submissions

While there are definitely more critical areas of the website optimization process there is perhaps no area subject to as much misinformation and to such a vast audience. Here are some common misconceptions that are often believed about search engine submissions:

1. You need to submit your website often to keep it indexed by the search engines

2. You need to submit your website to thousands and thousands of search engines to get decent traffic

3. Submitting your website often will keep you at the top of the search engine rankings

These beliefs are all incorrect and those who can make a quick buck selling this disservice perpetrate them. If you have not recently received an email offering to "Submit Your Website To More Search Engines Than There Are Websites On The Internet For Just $19.95 Per Month!" then I can pretty much guarantee that you will in the not-too-distant future if your email can be found somewhere on your website.

An irony of this can be found in Google's webmaster area where they note:

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

Good advice as I'm sure Google has their website submissions taken care of. Just because you receive such an email, doesn't mean that you're missing out on anything. Let's first look at a breakdown of which engines are responsible for which traffic.

According to research the major search engines are responsible for the following percentages of traffic as of June 2004:

Google ? 41.6%
Yahoo ? 31.5%
MSN ? 27.4% (MSN draws their results from Yahoo!/Overture)
AOL ? 13.6% (AOL draws their results from Google)
Ask Jeeves ? 7.0%
Lycos ? 3.7%
Netscape ? 3.0% (Netscape draws their results from Google)
AltaVista ? 2.7% (AltaVista draws the Yahoo!/Overture)

Source: Neilson/Netratings (http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/)
Note: These numbers total over 100% as people may use multiple search engines if they don't find the information they are looking for at the first one they try.

So what does this tell us? This tells us that the very vast majority of search engine traffic does not come from many thousands of search engines but rather, relatively few. This would lead to the obvious questions, "Is it worth paying to be submitted to thousands of search engines?" The real answer, "No."

Then How Do I Submit My Own Website?

Automated search engine submission systems simply access the existing and readily accessible "Add URL" pages of the search engines and automatically submit your site. You can do this yourself simply by visiting the search engines and submitting through these same pages.

To simplify this process you can visit the "search engines" page on the Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning website (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/info/search-engines-major.htm) where we link directly to the submissions pages of the major engines.

But What About The Other Engines? Surely They Provide Some Traffic?

Quite honestly, they may. You may get a visitor or two. Is it worth $19.95/mth or some such amount? No. You can get a better dollar/visitor ratio on any of the many PPC engines out there.

An additional point to note is that you may want to actually visit some of the lists of engines on the sites offering these services to you. You will discover a couple of important facts:

- Many of these so-called "search engines" are not engines at all but rather FFA (Free-For-All) pages and classified ads sites. They will not help your rankings, you will not see traffic from them and your listing will probably last about as long as spam in your Inbox.

- Many of the actual search engines and directories are topical. What this means is that they are focused on a single area and unless your site coincidentally is about space exploration, topographical mapping, etc. you won't get listed. Submitting should not be confused with "guaranteed listing". Submitting your site to thousands of engines is not the same as getting your website indexed on thousands of engines.

The Submission Myth

The truth of that matter is, submitting your website at all can realistically be considered a waste of time. Aside from a few key general directories (DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.) and a number of SEO directories, we did not submit the website www.beanstalk-inc.com to any of the major search engines. It's true, not a single submission.

Are we indexed? Yes we are.

How did we get indexed without submitting our site? If you take the time that you would be spending submitting your site and spend it instead finding quality inbound links (which we will write about next week) your site will be indexed and much quicker than you think.

You've probably heard the term "search engine spider". Search engines crawl websites. This means that they visit a page, follow all the links on that page and so on. If you have a link on a website that is already known to the search engines it is only a matter of time before your website will be found by default. If fact, when the Beanstalk site went live and the first link was established to it, it did not take the weeks that are estimated through the use of the submissions pages for our site to be found. The homepage of beanstalk-inc.com was index by Google three days after the site went live and the other major engines followed within a week or so.

Final Notes

If there are any points that I hope you take away from this article they are the following:

1. Automated search engine submissions services are not worth the money they charge.

2. You do not need to be submitted to thousands of "search engines". The vast majority of traffic comes from the top few.

3. You will want to consider whether it is even worth the time to submit to search engines or whether that time could be better spent building quality, relevant links to your site and submitting your site to the major and topical directories.

An additional failing to the automated submissions systems not covered above is their inability to take into consideration the exact characteristics of your website for their directory submissions. When you're submitting your website to directories you will have to choose the exact category your site falls into. Most directories have slightly different category hierarchies and the more exact you are in your submission, the higher the chance you will be listed. Automated systems can never be as exact across multiple directories as a human can.

Submitting your website, even correctly, will not guarantee you top rankings however it will leave you with money in your pocket to spend on other promotional endeavors that may actually produce a solid ROI. And THAT'S what it's all about.

The rankings? You'll have to read the other nine steps of the series to find out how to attain those.

Next Week

In part eight of this search engine positioning series we will cover the importance of link building, how to attain high quality, relevant links to your website, and the tools to reduce the time it take to do so significantly. With the importance of inbound links to your overall rankings you won't want to miss this very important step in the website optimization process.

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines. To keep informed about what going on in the SEO world you may also want to visit the newly created SEO blog on the Beanstalk website.

---

How My Page Rank Went From 0 to 5 In One Update - How Yours Can Too

Increase Your Google Page Rank!Page Rank. We all know what... Read More

How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 2

Question 1Does it help to track visitor behavior on websites... Read More

Is Something Missing From Your Keywords Research? (Part 1)

As you may already know, keywords are an essential part... Read More

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google

Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number... Read More

SEO: When Being Optimized Can Hurt

It's a marketing dream come true: A potential customer, looking... Read More

Link Building - The Waiting Game

Link building is a waiting game. Many clients have asked... Read More

Keyword Demand Isnt Enough

I get half of the world traffic for the term... Read More

Search Engine Musical Chairs

News broke this week that Yahoo has purchased the Inktomi... Read More

Why Do You Want to Link With A Home Business And Affiliate Website?

No, it's not a general question for all and sundry.... Read More

Site Maps: Let Search Engines Find Your Pages

With 40 million websites in existence, and more than 3... Read More

How to Verify and Monitor Your Search Engine Listing on Google?

Being listed in search engines and ranked high on searches... Read More

Internet 2005: The Ten Billions Pages Search Engines

To see each and every page during 10 seconds would... Read More

Should You Buy Text Links?

You can rank number one (Or at least in the... Read More

Five and a Half Ways to Amp Up Your Search Engine Optimization

Statistics show that 85% of pages visited on the Internet... Read More

Website Submission - What You May Not Know About Search Engine Indexing

Getting your website listed in the search engines is relatively... Read More

Search Engine Algorithm Quandaries

Before you make drastic changes to your website after a... Read More

Google Traffic Report Card-Does Your Website Pass? Part 1

This is part 1 of a 7 part series that... Read More

If Content is King, then surely Relevance is Queen!

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in... Read More

How and When Should I Submit My Website to Google?

As soon as you register your domain name, submit it... Read More

Search Engine Optimization Lies & Misconceptions

In a perfect world, everyone would be honest.In a perfect... Read More

How To Indirectly Get To The Top Of Search Engines

There are millions of web sites trying to get listed... Read More

Is My Search Engine Optimization Working?

You've just built a website and can't wait to start... Read More

Optimize Your Site Pt2

6: The hidden benefits to having the right links. Every... Read More

13 Tips For Good Search Engine Placements

When used properly in combination with other basic search engine... Read More

Lets Make Your Website #1

Their is simple way of making your website rank top... Read More

Google ? A Bit of History

The first question most people have is, "What the heck... Read More

Keyword Targeting Strategy In Your Site

Once the keywords have been decided for the site one... Read More

Search Engine Wars - Quality Searches Vs Quantity!

It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on... Read More

Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

There are a lot of ways to promote your website... Read More

Valid HTML code is crucial to Search Engine Optimization

Why valid HTML code is crucial to your web site's... Read More

Six Reasons Why Your Alexa Rating Is Still Important

1. Additional Exposure For Your Site.At the end of 2003,... Read More

Reciprocal Link Exchange Management Software

When shopping online for Link Management Software that can... Read More

From Corpora to Matching

Making effective use of the Internet is increasingly about creating... Read More