Search engine submission techniques issues – how to use meta tags, submit URLs.
Posted on | December 13, 2007 | No Comments
Automated Search Engine Submissions
If you run a search on Google for “automatic search engine submission services” you may be surprised by a couple of things: firstly, you will get millions of results, which would seem to indicate this is a growth industry. Secondly, one of the top sites listed in those results promises to submit your site to over 600,000 sites! And another one promises a million!
Whether they really do is a moot point… who’s going to count? The real question here is whether spending money to conduct search engine submission automatically is a wise investment.
Let’s look at what automatic search engine submission accomplishes, whether it’s even necessary, and if it’s better to do it yourself or hire a service like the ones mentioned above.
The Truth About Automated Search Engine Submission Services
Beware big numbers. Search engine submission services that offer to submit your URL to thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites are not submitting it to search engines alone. In those numbers, they are including free-for-all sites, classified ad sites and online malls that will accomplish nothing for you except maybe a sudden flood of spam to your inbox.
The fact remains that most of your search engine-generated traffic will come to you via searches conducted on three sites: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. And each one of them has an online form that allows you to manually submit your URL all by yourself, for free. It’s quick and easy to do.
In the past, these forms were badly spammed by automated submission programs, so now the engines require submitters to transcribe a dynamically generated code, a task that defeats automatic programs and ensures only legitimate, manual submissions are accepted.
Non-Automated Submission Techniques
So let’s look at some non-automated ways to get your site noticed and indexed by the search engines:
1. Manual search engine submission using online submission forms. Since the top three engines – Google, Yahoo! and MSN – drive most of the traffic cruising the web, start with them. If your site is web crawler friendly, in other words search engine crawlers can navigate easily from one page to all the others, then you really only need to submit your top-level URL to the links below. The crawlers and bots will find and index the rest of your pages automatically. (Site maps make your pages more spiderable so we recommend them highly.)
2. PPC Advertising. As manual search engine submission does not guarantee inclusion, and being indexed and ranked doesn’t happen immediately… it can take a few months. Those in a hurry for traffic may want to consider PPC advertising.
3. Link Building / Wait for the spiders to find you. This sounds simpler than it actually is because in order for the search engine crawlers to locate your site, they need to follow a link to get there. But all it takes is one or two established websites displaying your link and the next time a crawler comes around, it will follow the bread crumbs directly to grandma’s house.
Try to get highly ranked sites with related themes and content to link to yours. Google and the other engines will rank your site more highly if it’s linked to from pages that are themselves considered important and relevant to yours.
Of course, there are other ways to attain incoming links: write and distribute articles for publication, issue press releases, start a blog, get your site listed in relevant business directories, and participate in forums. These are all perfectly viable ways to get your first incoming links and get on the radar. After that, a steady link building campaign will keep your links fresh and keep the spiders interested.
In Summary
If you’ve recently launched a new site and want to start getting some free search engine traffic, avoid costly automated search engine submission services and follow these tips instead:
- Make your site web crawler friendly so all your pages can be crawled and indexed.
- Submit your top pages manually to the major search engines and related directories.
- Seek out incoming links from websites related to your industry that already have decent rankings themselves.
- Generate your own incoming links with articles, press releases, forum and blog entries, etc.
Search engine submission is just the beginning. In order to get higher rankings and more traffic, you’ll need a complete search engine optimization strategy. You can learn more about that here.
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