How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines

Actually you don't need to submit your website to the major search engines as they can find you if you have just one link to your website on another site that is crawled regularly. Following are several options for getting your websites listed in search engines and directories and submission tactics you should avoid.

Paid Inclusion on Search Engines

Some search engines require paid inclusion when submitting your website. Others 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:

Search engines do not provide a static link to your website (because it is dynamically driven software) so your site won't rank well in ANY search engine without a lot of links from other websites.

The best source for links will be other websites in your niche or business. 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 that they submit 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 site to all those engines and the results are often junk links, i.e., submitting your cooking site to an automobile search engine.

Provide Good Content and You Won't Need to Submit Anywhere.

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
  3. Purchasing links
  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, CSS 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 unique or 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. Check your top competitors to see what they are doing that makes their site unique from all others. 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.

Google has also started using something called User Experience (UX) to decide which sites should rank higher, which usually means people are staying longer on your site, visiting several of your pages, sending you emails, etc. This can be accomplished by providing articles on every aspect of your niche or business. Google also takes into account how much social activity your site receives, i.e., forums or social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. If a lot of people are mentioning your site (even when they don't post a link) it helps your ranking, because Google can tell that people like your site just by the source of the links.

Sign Up With Search Engine Webmaster Tool Sites

Both Google's Search Console and Bing's Webmaster Tools (the only two search engines that matter), have a webmaster tools account that you can sign up for, which lets you know if there are any serious problems with your site that affect rank and indexing.

Submitting to Directories

Most general directories have closed down due to Google penalizing them in recent years but being full of nothing but links. Those that required paid inclusion for "review" (Yahoo) didn't fare any better than free directories (ODP), which are both closed down now. Even free directories were penalized because submitting to directories goes against New and Improved rules, Google's Guidelines for linking which is people linking to your site without any incentive from you. It's still ok to submit your site to directories that are relevant to your niche or to local directories.

order an In-Depth SEO Analysis Report

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

Lori Eldridge
Copyright © July 5, 2001, updated 11-04-20
All rights reserved.

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