This is a question that comes up often… “To how many Search Engines should I submit my site?”
There are millions of searches being performed each and every day. Getting sites indexed in order to receive free traffic from the SEs is one crucial step towards becoming free in your Internet business endeavors.
So what’s the answer? To how many?
- Yahoo!
- Live (MSN)
- Ask
These are the “Search Engine Boys” if you so will. Yes, only four. Not a silly 30,000, 3,000 or 300, only 4 (four). These four cover 95% of all searches performed online. All others are either aggregators (i.e., use one of the above SE‘s technology) or are just too insignificant in importance.
As an old saying goes, better focus on the 20% that cover 80% of the market. (Here it’s rather focusing on the 5% that cover 95%.)
That means, whenever you get an offer such as “we’ll submit your site to 300+ Search Engines” — it might sound great but forget it! You do more harm than good to your site’s health.
“But where exactly do I submit my site(s) to?” you ask? I knew you would. ;-)
OK, here we go…
Yahoo!
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Live/MSN
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
Ask
None.
Oops! Why “none”? They say they will discover your site through links from other sites to yours.
Now, it may take up to several months until they indexed your site. Yup, that much. I do have a much faster method though.
Do you want to know how to get your site(s) indexed in as little as 48 hours (or less)?
Stay tuned. I’m going to post that tutorial soon. :-)
—Marcus Hochstadt
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Thanks for the Live/MSN link, I had been needing that one. I’ll be waiting for that Ask link :)
Markus,
Thanks for the Entrecard recommendation!
The 80/20 rule definitely applies for search engines as well. That is, 80% of your search traffic (if not more) comes from 20% of the search engines out there.
I don’t directly submit my site to any of the search engines anymore, but it’s always good to have those links handy in case a client asks for them!
Waiting for the next article, this one was useful too. By the way, how about you adding “Top Commentators” plugin to your blog. It will encourage visitors to comment on your blog.
My answer: none.
Search engines find your blog/site from links. If your site doesn’t have links, chances are you aren’t going to be included into the index, even if you submitted to it.
My advice: work on gaining links and don’t worry about submitting to the search engines.
Gary,
The core of my message was actually to forget about submitting to hundreds or even thousands of Search Engines when the entire group consists of only four. (You know those Webhosts that promote those kind of silly services.)
But principally, I agree with what you said. I just would extend it to getting the on-page criteria right, too. Gaining links is a long-term task. Getting your source code right, on the other hand, can be done in minutes (or days, when speaking of blogs) while having a similar effect (approx. 40%).
In my opinion submitting a webpage is the last appeal of a bitter webmaster. This isn’t the natural way to get recognised.
The spiders of the major search engines continuously crawl the content of the Internet across links. These connections among websites pass forward to different things, which are the most important seo factors, the relevance and the importance.
If I would link to your site using the “car rental” phrase as anchor text i would increase the relevance of your site for the mentioned expression and your site would share in the PageRank of my linking webpage.
Don’t waste your time with search engine submission. If you have serious plans concerning internet marketing, go for some backlinks and your site will start the competition with some relevance and importance as well.
Regards, Resonate
Seo Sem Web Standards & Web Analytics Consultancy
http://cbarker.ws/
I find that it is hard to make seo, not imposible tough. I see that the last comment was from 2008. Today i see and hearing a lot of good things about bing. Can you tell us more about this search engine. I heard that it youses google and yahoo’s search engine or something like that. Please correct my if I am wrong.
Hi Marcus!
I believe that we need to submit our sites to as many search engines as possible if we really want to rank and I think, it is much better that we just submit to major search engines like Google and Bing.