The Truth About Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

One of the most common myths in the SEO industry is that it is important to submit your site to a "thousand major search engines." This "service" is often foisted upon unsuspecting and ill-advised web masters as a sure-fire way to get their site ranking highly for profitable key words and phrases. In reality, it's just a lot of smoke and mirrors and techno-jargon.

Why is Submitting to the Search Engines Unnecessary?

There are a number of reasons why submitting your site to thousands of search engines is not worth the time it would take.

1. 1. There are only three main search engines. Between all three, they represent 97 percent of the search market share. If you're going to insist on submitting your site, just concentrate on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
2. 2. Site submission is so easy, anyone can do it. You don't need to pay someone tons of money to do it for you.
3. 3. If the search engines can't find your site without being told where it is, you're going to have some real problems getting traffic.
4. 4. Site submission only guarantees indexing. It has nothing to do with linking. Again, if the search engines couldn't find you on their own, you'll have a lot of trouble ranking highly in the search engine response pages for anything.
5. 5. Search engines should be able to find your site without you needing to submit it. Through judicious and ethical link building and organic SEO efforts, you will be able to attract notice without demanding it.

Real SEOs Know Better

"SEOs" who offer this service are either 1) stuck back in the early nineties when this technique was moderately necessary and there were more then 3 major search engines or 2) counting on your ignorance to make them money. Either way, you don't want to work with them.

Organic SEO,when it is done properly makes submitting your site to the search engines a redundant effort since the search engines will be finding it anyway. A far more helpful technique is to make sure that you have a site map containing links to every page of your site linked to from your home page so that once the search engines do get there, they will have a very easy way to index the rest of your site.

And always remember, good SEO is the only thing that will get your site ranking well once it's indexed. Getting the search engines to notice it is only the first step!