Why You Probably Don't Need to Submit to Search Engines

This is going to sound crazy: you may not need to submit to search engines.

How could that be the case? Aren't search engines an important part of the whole process of optimizing your website?

The short answer is "yes". The longer answer is that while search engines are crucial to optimizing your website, you probably don't need to take the time to manually submit to them. This article is simply an explanation of this longer answer. It ends with a brief characterization of strategies for getting the search engines to see your website, without you having to submit to them!

Out of the many, you need only a few

There are way too many search engines out there. For the purposes of driving traffic to your website(s), the reality is that you only need a few. That said, why take the time and money necessary to submit to ALL the search engines? That's right-some search engines, especially the lesser-known search engines, require a fee to submit to.

From what I can tell in visiting the most renowned SEO-related forums (in particular, the digital point forums), webmasters agree that the biggies are Google.com (of course), Yahoo.com, AltaVista.com, and MSN.com. There are a couple more that you could submit to (and see this article if you're interested in these additional search engines), but they won't drive nearly as much traffic as the big three.

Given enough time, most search engines will do your work for you

If you give Google.com about a month, you'll notice that it indexes your website for you. How do I know? I know because it indexed my blog in about that time. Of course, being part of wordpress.com's domain had something to do with it, but from the research I've done, webmasters seem to agree that if you have optimized content (in terms of keyword density) and enough content, Google.com (and the other important ones) will pick you up.

According to this article, search engines start at the websites with the most outgoing links and work there way to the individual websites associated with those links.

"Search engines start at one website with a large number of outbound links (usually a directory). They follow every link they come across, indexing each page they arrive at. Once a page has been indexed they follow all the links from that page. And so on until there are no more links to follow."

To take advantage of the way search engines update their databases, you need inbound links.

Inbound links ARE necessary

When search engines sniff around the Internet for websites with a certain keyword or set of keywords, they check to see where a new website has referrals. That's why you need to have inbound links-that is, links to your website from other websites-in order to be seen by the search engines. Think of inbound links as the trace or clue that the search engine sees.

The simple truth is, if you want to be seen by the biggies, you need to have inbound links. The faster and the more inbound links you have, the faster you'll be recognized when search engines are updating their databases.

To make your website visible, you need to market, not submit!

You might be asking yourself "how do I get people [other websites] to link to me". A sophisticated answer is outside the scope of this article, but there is a simpler answer that'll get you on the right track.

The first step is to have enough content. Make sure the content you have is rich in the keywords you want. It's pointless to have a bunch of irrelevant content. Next, you need to take advantage of free article directories and use them to point to your website. Focus on a few of these directories and write good articles. Don't necessarily just copy/paste content from your website to the article directories, although you can certainly do that in a limited capacity.

Register with forums featuring respected users in the area you're interested in. If you're interested in affiliate marketing, for instance, and your website has information about strategies for Clickbank's affiliate programs, then you'll want to register with respected forums in the area of affiliate marketing. One such forum is the digital point forums, located at http://forums.digitalpoint.com

Make sure your signature is current. This includes your forum signatures and your email signatures. This will point people to your site and increase your inbound links.

Take advantage of the big social networking services such as myspace and facebook. There are many in-depth guides available for effective marketing with these services.

You DO need to submit to directories.

I want to end this article by pointing out that there is one kind of submitting you really do need to partake in: submitting to directories. Directories are databases of websites conveniently categorized by topic. As you will recall, search engines look for new websites by the number of inbound links associated with a particular websites. This means that they basically look at directories. Submit to directories and the right search engines will be clued in to your presence.

Open directory (this is the directory Google.com uses) and Yahoo directory are two sources of incoming links you need to take immediate advantage of. There are others you can submit to but these two should be your immediate concerns. As I mentioned before, article directories are important, too.

Good luck in getting your website noticed and make sure you plan out your strategy with the right content BEFORE you go about implementing these methods.