Submitting Websites to Search Engines and Directories

Paid Inclusion on Search Engines

Several of the major search engines and directories require paid inclusion when submitting your website. Other search engines charge a fee for business sites only, or give you an option for a paid listing, which is faster, or a free listing which takes longer and isn't guaranteed. Sometimes paying for inclusion doesn't result in any better results than not paying. You can submit your site to Google for free so paying someone else to do this for you is a waste of money. Some search engines won't even guarantee you a listing, even with a paid submission, so read the fine print.

The most important thing to know about submitting your website is:


The best source for links to your site will be other websites in your niche, directories, forums or social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. So, signing up for a PayPerClick service may be needed to gain traffic until you can gather enough quality links.

Submitting Websites to Thousands of Search Engines

I do not recommend that you use submission services that register your website on hundreds or thousands of search engines at once because most search engines exclude automatic listings. Any website offering this service is usually a Submission Scam. And some of those companies advertise submission to search engines that have closed down years ago. Once they type in your data it only takes them a few seconds to submit your sites and the results are usually junk, i.e., submitting your cooking site to an automobile search engine.

Provide Good Content and you Won't Need to Submit

Google has devalued any type of link that you gain by your own effort which includes:

1. Trading links
2. Setting up a network of domains you own for the purpose of gaining backlinks.
3. Purchasing links (Google removed the PageRank from links in directories).
4. Being involved in triangular linking schemes.

That means one-way links you didn't gather yourself are the best links you can get and the best way to gather those is to provide information on your website that people will link to without asking. I provide a lot of graphic tutorials, HTML tips, articles on hosting and SEO scams on this website which brings most of my traffic and links.

Getting More Visitors to your Website

The more diversified your information, or the more popular your product, the more visitors you will have to your website. If you're not getting the amount of Internet traffic you desire consider offering unique information on your product, a video, or adding to your product line. Adding a FAQ page on your product or service or a testimonial page will attract more visitors also. Adding new content or a new page to your site every week or so will also keep the search engines coming back for more because they like fresh content.

For more info on finding websites to submit to check out:
Getting Good Backlinks
Directories that Pass PR (Page Rank)
DIrectories to Avoid
How to find Scraper Directories

Lori Eldridge
Copyright © July 5, 2001, updated 3-23-08
All rights reserved.

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