SEO Site Submissions- The Myth
There is no longer any need to submit your sites to search engines (though this does not apply to directories) as all the important search engines will find and index your site from links pointing to it from other sites. I know, I know this is in contradiction to all those emails you get offering to submit your site to 100,000 search engines for $25, but the unvarnished truth is that Google, Yahoo and MSN together account for more than 90% of all search engine traffic, and much of the remaining 10% comes from search engines which are fed by Google (like AOL and Netscape) and Yahoo, who feed Alltheweb, Lycos, and AltaVista among others. There are other search engines which are important for traffic such as AskJeeves but most modern search engines will find your pages all by themselves.
A single link will often do the job of getting your site spidered and indexed, such as a link from your website designer or a link from a website design or SEO forum. You will want to add your site to as many directories as possible and these links will also help.
What is important is to make sure that when your site goes live that it is ready for the public and the search engine spiders.
Make sure your pages are error free
Before you start thinking about submitting your pages to the search engines take some time to ensure that they are error free and contain what you want the search engines to see. Especially ensure that there are no broken links or HTML syntax errors, all the meta tags you want to use are there (and that they contain your optimized content) and that your body is readable, has no spelling errors and is optimized for search engines.
The great online tools at Search Engine World will double check your site (once it's published) and :
- Check your web page sizes with the WebPage Size Checker .
- Sim Spider will show you how a spider sees your site.
- Check your server header with the Server Header Checker
- Check your html with the html validator .
- Double check your robots.txt with the robots.txt validator .
- Check your pages with the Keyword Density Analyzer .
You might also want to download the free Xenu program to check all the links on your site. When your site is up and running this handy tool will give you a report on all internal and external links, redirects and other information also. If you have your web pages set up with keyword rich page titles Xenu will also build you a site map using the page title of each page as the anchor text to that page.
Time to Listing?
Please remember that search engines do not index your site immediately after you submit to them or they find them. At this time most major search engines will find your sites within a few days to a week of the links pointing to your pages being found, but the depth of that spidering and indexing will vary greatly depending on your site architecture, how many pages you have, if they are static or dynamic and the search engines involved.
Just to complicate the issue, search engine spider sometimes have more activity than at other times. At this time Goggle and MSN are finding and indexing sites initially within a week and Yahoo within a month.
There are also some other ways of getting into the engines and directories, but at a cost.
Many directories charge for listings (most are one time charges but Yahoo charges $300 per year for its listing) and you can add pages to Yahoo through their SiteMatch program, which has a fixed annual cost per page plus a cost for every clickthru. This can be an expensive option, but it will get your pages included fast, they will be respidered every day and you will have some optimization advantages that free pages do not.
Back to Robots.txt |
 Cloaking |
