Search Engine Submission
Search engine placement is an important part of your website that may get lost in the shuffle. People often get caught up in securing hosting and developing their site, that submitting to search engines gets left out. Unless you have huge brand recognition, thousands of links leading into your site, or are in an industry with minimal competition and typical search phrases that relate to nothing else, then you seriously need to consider a search engine submission strategy. And even if you think you are in a none competitive industry, just go to your favorite search engine and search for some phrases that you think your potential customers might use to find you and see how many pages you are competing with.
Won't they find me anyway?
With more web pages than ever, with thousands upon thousands being added to the web everyday, this is probably not the best strategy to take. Understand, search engines are constantly indexing and re-indexing sites. You see, they don't just index a site and then move on down the line. Think of it like being at an amusement park, waiting in line for the most incredible and popular ride there. Now, not only are you behind everyone who is in front of you, this ride also has one of those "speed lines." In this case, those speed lines are for those who are really important or who "make themselves" important. You can submit to the engines, making yourself more important or you can wait in the endless line on a hot day! The line doesn't move any faster and the really important people will still get preference over you, but the line is always shorter from the middle than it is from the end.
So I should submit to thousands of search engines?
Careful here. Yes, we've all seen those free submission sites where they submit your site to 30,000 or 100,000 or some other outrageous number. And they do it for free, or really, really cheaply. That old 80/20 rule applies online too. 80% of the search traffic is handled and managed by 20% of the search engines. You probably can't even name 20 search engines yourself, let alone 30,000. Some of these search engines are special topic search engines, so submitting to them will be a waste. Worse, some of these may be more interested in harvesting your information, like address, phone, email, etc., than they are about helping people find your site. This isn't always the case and there are many who don't fall into either of these categories, but it still probably isn't worth the time, effort, or money to submit to them.
But it's okay to use one of those submission sites, right?
Unless they state otherwise, most of those search engine submission sites use auto-submission software, if they even submit your site at all. What you may not realize is that search engines really frown upon auto-anything. Just like the bandwidth that comes with your hosting, these search engines need to manage their bandwidth as well. They also have to deal with the number of requests that their servers are handling at one time. Compare it to your electric company on the hottest day of the Summer and what happens if everyone switches their air conditioning on at all once… the system overloads and they have a mess trying to get things fixed and up and running again. Same thing happens here. If not carefully controlled, these auto-submitters end up hitting the search engines with a bunch of submissions all at once.
So what's a website to do?
The best way to handle search engine submission is by hand. Every engine is different in the information they require and how it needs to be presented to them and the rules for submissions that they have established. Submitting to search engines is something most people can do themselves, but as you can see, there is often more involved than just knowing which search engines to submit to. Besides, you probably have better things to do with your time. For many, a better strategy is to have this done by a firm that will manage your submissions. They'll determine the best search engines to submit your site to, make sure that the submission is handled correctly, monitor the submission, and may even monitor the emails through their own system to reduce the changes of your email getting spammed… that alone, as they say, is often worth much more than the price of admission!
While we currently don't offer this service, we know it is important to our customers. We recommend the services of Identity Developments. They are actually a web presence development firm, so they offer a full suite of services beyond just search engine submission, including website development and management, web promotion, site optimization, and a related service, search engine optimization (SEO). SEO goes much, much further than just search engine submission and may be something for you to consider as well, however SEO services are also much more expensive than submissions. You might even want them to design a site for you, they designed ours! Mention that you were referred by wayMad Host and you can get a discount off of your search engine submission.