SEO Mistake: Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Submitting your site to a search engine simply involves going to the search engine’s website, filling out a form, telling the search engine the address to your website and what the relevant keywords are.

Sounds simple, fast and harmless. That’s what people in favour of of submitting will tell you.

“Submitting doesn’t hurt anything.”

“It’s best to make sure you’re covering all your bases.”

Unfortunately, some new website owners, desperate for traffic and motivated by spammy services that promise to submit the new site to thousands of search engines, or hundreds of directories, buy into this idea and find themselves separated from their money with no real return on investment.

The Truth about Search Engines

First, there are only four search engines. Any other site that calls itself a search engine these days simple displays results from one of the big four – Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. Submitting your site to any other “search engine” is a waste of time.

Second, search engines use programs called robots or spiders to crawl the web. This means that the spiders follow links from one web page to another and from one website to another. And when the spider encounters new content, a new page or a new site, it indexes the information. In other words, it sends the new content and its location back to the search engine.

Then, when someone searches a keyword phrase on the search engine’s site or in their browser toolbar, the visitor is given a list of relevant results on the search engine results page (SERP).

Your pages will appear in the SERPs for relevant keyword phrases even if you never submit your site to a search engine. Submitting your site doesn't speed up the process. It can take weeks for the search engines to list your site as a result of submission.

If you want your site to be found by the search engines all you have to do is make sure you have links to your site from sites that are already indexed: EzineArticles, YouTube, Twitter, a popular blog...

So what does this mean for you?

1. Don’t waste your time or money submitting your site to search engines.
2. Focus your efforts on developing quality content for your site and for other people’s sites. Call it search engine food.
3. Work on developing relationships with the owners of high ranking websites in your niche. A website owner who knows, likes and trusts you is more likely to link to you in the content of his website.

You really don't need to spend time or money submitting your site to search engines.