Daily SEO Tips- Don’t submit your site to 5500 search engines
In the dawn of search engine optimization days there were a lot of search engines out there. Well, they CALLED themselves search engines, but in fact they were glorified directories. Actually they weren’t even directories, in hindsight they were massive link farms. They were in every piece of search engine submission software available. 99.9999% no one had ever heard of, but the idea back then was to get your name out to every nook and cranny of the web.
A close cousin to this search engine/directory/link farm hybrid was the Free For All site. Essentially another link farm, these repositories were just massive one way links from their site to yours.
Thank our lucky stars we came to our senses … for the most part.
Many people still believe if you submit to hundreds of search engines you will be flooded with visitors and prospects eager to buy your product.
That might be true, but you can bet your bottom dollar that only the big search engines are generating any significant number of visitors for you. By big search engines I refer to Google, Yahoo and other popular engines.
The truth is that if you submit to hundreds of search engines you have just wasted your time, because only a small percentage (and I mean small) of them will send you any decent monthly traffic. They might claim to be visited lots of times but that’s mostly other webmasters submitting their URL and not actually using the search engine to find websites of interest to them.
In fact there are STILL currently hundreds of search engines out there, most of them are not much more than an advanced FFA page.
Beware of ads such as ’submit to the top 500 search engines for only $99′. I say this because generally only the top 3 or 4 will drive traffic to your site. It doesn’t take much time to manually submit to these top engines and your $99 could better be spent on Google Adwords, or on any of the other marketing methods which are available to the modern Internet marketing professional.
At the moment the top search sites – meaning both directories and search engines account for just over 93% of all search engine referred traffic going to websites. The other 6.something% is made up of hundreds of sites claiming to be search engines.
What are the search sites you need to concentrate on to drive proper traffic to your site? Here’s the sites I consider the most important. This list is of course open to interpretation, but remember, this is my blog and my opinion. A point to note is that the first four sites on the list are ordered by importance to me and not necessarily by the amount of traffic the individual site can send to a website.
http://www.google.com
The most popular search engine by far, a good ranking for two or three of your keywords here could result in a lot more monthly traffic for your site. Good ranking can be achieved by distributing your keywords frequently throughout the important places of your pages and by having lots of incoming links.
http://www.yahoo.com
Yahoo although losing ground to Google is still a very popular place for search. Its search results are provided by Google so in all but a few cases good rankings in Google means good rankings in Yahoo. The Yahoo directory is still very popular so check out Yahoo submitting tips for the lowdown on getting into their index.
http://www.dmoz.org (Open Directory Project- ODP)
Dmoz.org itself will not send you much traffic, I have ranked it the third most important search site anyhow as its true importance lies in the fact that lots of third party sites including Google use ODP data on their sites. What this means is that if your listed on dmoz.org you will soon notice your site is being found on sites such as the Google Directory, AOL search, Netscape Search and Lycos to name just a few.
Here in no particular order are the other sites I consider important for anybody conducting a search engine campaign.
http://www.msn.com
- Bill et company have been trying for years to crack the search market, but they are indefinitely stalled at number 3 – at least until they swallow Yahoo.
http://www.altavista.com
- Not a popular as it used to be, but still can drive decent traffic.
http://www.aolsearch.com
- STILL Used by millions of AOL subscribers everyday, at least until AOL is broken up by Time Warner. Powered by Google and DMOZ.
http://www.lycos.com
- Unbelievable but it’s still very popular!
So there you have it, my 7 search sites to submit to. Remember, if you submit to hundreds of search engines you have just wasted your time, because only a small percentage (and I mean small) of them will send you any decent monthly traffic.
