Submitting Your Site to Search Engines
If you are paying to have your site submitted to search engines, you are wasting your money! Even worse, you may have your site banned from some of them. I’m sure you’ve seen kind of pitches these before:
“Submit Your Site to Over 312600 Search Engines”
“Submit your site to 148 major search engines in one click”
312,600 search engines, 148 search engines! What a joke - save your money!
You need to concern yourself with only four search engines. That’s right, only 4. And even then, you can safely ignore two of them and still get the vast majority of relevant search traffic to your site.
Google and Yahoo accounted for over three quarters of all searches carried out in the US in April. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live Search service came in a far-away third, with 9 percent of the market
The stats in the UK are even more slanted towards Google. (It’s hard to find data for the Irish market because it’s so small, but the UK is a good indicator).
I’m sure you’re convinced at this point, and the exact statistics are not important. Let’s see how to get your site listed!
First of all, you don’t HAVE to submit your site. If the site has incoming links from other sites that are already listed in the search engines then the search engine will find it automatically, no action necessary!
Submitting your site to the top search engines
If you really want to submit your site to the top 5 search engines then here’s how:
- Google - submit your web address here
- Yahoo - submit your web address here
- MSN/Live.com - submit your web address here
- Ask.com - create a sitemap and then follow the instructions here
- AOL - no submission necessary! (AOL search is powered by Google)
If you do not have any incoming links then you need to start link building (you should do this anyway). We can help!
I hope you found this article helpful, please give your feedback via the comments form below - thanks!
Very true! People offering to submit website to search engines are just rip off merchants.
Spend your money on something better like producing a website that people want to read. Good quality content always does better in the long run than any “made for Google” rubbish.
I agree with Mike, good content, linking with sites related to your business, good website layout are more effective strategies. if you do it right you will be found by the search engines!!
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Amen - looking at stats, Google and Yahoo are hands down the top two - and on my site, Google dominates yahoo.
Don’t waste your money on those paid submissions. I would also say don’t waste your time with manual submissions. Traffic will be negligible.
Yes linking with sites and submit to search engines is the best way to get your site visible on search engines like google, yahoo, and Msn..
Nice and very informative site..
This is very informative site good contain and nice post. That is fact linking with sites and submit sites in search engine is useful to increase site ranking.
Submit website to all search engines, yes that is waste of time, just submit to major search engines is enough.
In my opinion the best way to get a site recognized by the search engines, and get a quick boost in the SERPS right off the bat is join a few of the big social bookmarks sites (Stumbleupon, digg, furl, reddit) and bookmark your site. Then add your site to google bookmarks, and my yahoo.
Your page should be indexed and searchable by the main search engine withing a few hours to a few days.
Thanks a lot for this info. I just submitted to yahoo as I didn’t know why my site was getting ranked high compared to google and msn.
I purchased GoDaddy’s traffic blazer. What a waste. They submit to a hand-full of sites automatically and then they have a gazillion sites you can submit to manually. Many of them are directories that require reciprocal links and some require money to be listed. My time would be better spend building links or relationship on social networks.
I am interested to know, however, if being listed in the Yahoo Directory makes a difference. It’s quite a big price tag. Also, does DMOZ listing actually make a difference (in your Google and Yahoo rank)?
Good tips for anyone starting out. The point of getting links from already indexed sites is certainly the best way to grow traffic. Starting a blog can have pages indexed in just a few hours if linked well. No need to submit it even.