Search Engine Submission To Major Search Engines and Directories
Submit Your Site To 10,000 Search Engines!
No, don’t bother.
Search engine submission to ten thousand search engines is a waste of your time, and you’ll probably just receive lots of unwanted email for your efforts. Actually, you don’t even have to submit your site to the major search engines these days as they prefer to find your site rather than the other way round.
Simply get a link to your site from a website already listed on the major search engines - i.e. Google, Yahoo! and MSN - and wait for your site to also get listed.
(Hopefully the web pages on your site contain informative content, good page titles and text in your meta description tag that sounds compelling. If your site is not optimised properly then you need to learn how to do this first, because getting found on search engines is more difficult than just getting listed on them.)
Should You Use Auto-Submission Tools?
Automatic site submission tools are of very little use when you consider a) there are very few major search engines and b) these search engines prefer to find your site. So, no, do not use these auto-submission tools (read above).
Instead, hand submit your site to search engines important to your niche and get found by the major search engines.
How Do I Get All of My Site Listed?
The major search engines, GOOGLE, YAHOO!, MSN, will index your home page first. These search engines will then explore the whole of your site via search engine robots and add all of the pages they find.
This means that it’s important to create a site map - a page that contains all of the important links on your website - and link to this site map from your homepage.
You can be even more proactive than this and actually add your site map to the major search engines. (Here’s how Google lets you do this - http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/.)
What About Directories?
There are important directories to get listed on. This can be easier said than done, however. In the case of DMOZ, a volunteer-edited directory, you can add your site and it may take months and months to get listed or it may never get listed.
Still, you should try to get your site added to important directories like DMOZ.
What makes a directory important? Lots of factors, not least of which is how popular that directory is (how many people use the site). StrongestLinks.com maintain a list of important directories, with details about popularity, what types of sites are allowed to be submitted and whether submission is free (quite often it is not).
Get your site added to a few directories per month, if you can afford to do so. Do not let cost put you off. Strongest Links maintains an updated list of major directories here - http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php
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Search engines and directories can still be a great way of getting free traffic to your website. But you only need to bother with a few search engines these days (particularly Google). Make sure your site is listed, but make sure your site is optimised first.