If you have a business that you’ve built a Website for, or indeed a fully online business, then you shouldn’t dismiss free listings in the major search engines as a source of traffic.
The Internet landscape is a constantly changing phenomenon and it can be very difficult to keep up-to-date with all of these changes.
This is never truer than where the major search engines are concerned. Getting listed in Google, for example, was much easier two or three years ago than it is now.
What with constantly changing search engine algorithms and the extra competition from more and more new Websites you can be forgiven for thinking that the work required to get a decent listing would be better spent elsewhere.
Of course, there are plenty of other things you can do to attract traffic to your Website, but most of them will be more costly than a free search engine listing so it’s definitely still well worth the time and effort to submit your Website to the major search engines.
A word of warning. Beware the online services that offer to submit your Website to hundreds or even thousands of search engines and directories for a fee.
There are plenty of horror stories about false and expensive promises to be found here.
It is much better to hand submit your Website to the comparatively small number of search engines that really matter, or get a reputable SEO company to do it for you.
Are the submission softwares that run from your own computer worth purchasing? Well, you’ll find mixed feelings about these if you surf around a few of the major Internet marketing forums.
A good one, which has seemingly worked for many, is AddWeb. This is a full-featured package that has many SEO tools as well as the submission engine.
One very good feature of this package is that you can submit your Website(s) on a daily basis without fear of over-submission because the software has a built in knowledge base that contains the submission guidelines of the search engines and directories it submits to so it is programmed not to over-submit.
Before submitting your Website you should make sure that your pages are properly optimized with the right keywords and meta tags and that the right pages are on the site concerning the owner/organization behind the site i.e. the major search engines will expect there to be a contact page, an about page, a disclaimer page and privacy policy page for them to take the Website seriously.
Your Website has to convey a professional impression of the person or organization behind it otherwise you run the risk of not being taken seriously – and that can result in you not being listed despite your best efforts.
Just because you’ve informed the search engines of the existence of your Website and they’ve sent their indexing software to have a look at it doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically be given a listing high enough in the results for your chosen keywords to get significant traffic. There’s a little more to it than that.
The main way that you’ll impress upon the search engines that your site is important and that they should take it seriously and list it prominently in their results is by getting lots of links to it from other Websites – and the more important the Websites you can get links from, the better – but that’s a whole other subject.
