Ongoing submissions to search engines? What a load of crap! Ok, so I have to admit it, before I really knew anything about SEO, I did look into it as well as it sounded resonable. But before you do the same mistake as many others, read this, cause it’ll save you a lot of money.
First of all, submitting your website to search engines is completely free, and you can do it yourself. All you have to do is to follow this link to submit your site to Google, this link to submit your site to MSN and this link to submit your site to Yahoo!.
However, the best way to get your site added to the search engines is to have links from other sites pointing to yours. SEO Bomb was never submitted to any search engines. All I did was to get one single link from another topical site. The rest is taken care of by the search engines themselves.
Despite the fact that this site is less than a month old, it receives 15% of it’s traffic from search engines and already has several top ten positions in Google on highly relevant keywords.
You can learn more about link building on the Link Building Blog.
Why Ongoing Submissions Doesn’t Make Any Sense
Now let me tell you why submitting your website on an ongoing basis is a waste of money. When you submit your site to a search engine, the search engine will send a “robot” to your site.
This search engine robot will then spider your site. What this basically means is that it will follow all links on your site, ie. links in your site navigation menu, your site content and all other links on your site. When the robot is done spidering your website, it will add it to the “search engine index”.
Now that the search engine has visited your site, it will revist automatically. That’s reason number one why ongoing submissions is a waste of money. Reason number two is that revisiting alone will not increase your positions in the search engines.
The only thing that will increase your posisions is SEO, or search engine optimization, and there are a lot of things that are easy to do.
SEO is no black magic, but rather to make it easier for the search engine to make sense of your site. To make the job easier for the robot to spider your site, you should add the following HTML code inside the HEAD tag of your website:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
With this, you’re telling the robot to index your site and to follow all links contained within your site. It is also recommended that you have something called robots.txt.
The robots.txt is simply a .txt file that you put in the root directory of your website, and unless you have any folders you don’t want to be indexed, I suggest you allow the robot to index your whole site. Your robots.txt will then look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap and Google Sitemap
To make it even easier for the search engine to find all your pages, you should add a site map. A site map is basically a page with links to all the pages on your site, and you should make one in HTML and you should also make a Google Sitemap.
One of my clients, GettingLean.com, a fitness and health oriented website didn’t have a Google Sitemap, so we decided to implement this. I used SOFTplus GSiteCrawler to spider and automatically generate the sitemap.
For starters, upon spidering the site, we discovered problems with his 404 page — Page Not Found. What happened was that the 404 page returned a 200 - Page Found. This is not good, so before we could do anything else, this problem had to be adressed. We used some PHP magic and edited the 404 to actually return a 404 so that the search engines understands what to do.
With that problem out of the way, we continued uploading the sitemap.xml file to Google, validated it — and waited for the spiders to go amok on his site.
Before we added the sitemap, he had about 2500 pages in the Google index. The day after submitting the sitemap, he had 12 500 pages indexed! One week after we did this, and the indexed pages had increased to 12 800. Now that’s what I call impressive.
You can check for yourself searching for site:www.gettinglean.com in Google.
By doing these few changes, I can guarantee you your site will be spidered on a regular basis. And the best thing? It’s completely free. So don’t waste your money on ongoing submissions to search engines, cause it ain’t gonna work!
…but of course, if you need any help with this, you know where to find me
Sverre Sjøthun
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