Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | Submitting to Search Engines (or not) Tip 8

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Tip 8 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is Submitting to Search Engines (or not).

Search engine submission is how a webmaster submits a web site directly to a search engine. While Search Engine Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site, it generally is not necessary. Because the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use crawlers, bots, and spiders that eventually would find all by themselves most web sites on the Internet.

There are two basic reasons to submit a web site or web page to a search engine. The first reason would be to add an entirely new web site because the site operators would rather not wait for a search engine to discover them. The second reason is to have a web page or web site updated in the respective search engine.

When I entered search engine submission in to Google I get 10,600,000 results.

You would think with over 10 million results submitting your site to the search engines would be a positive thing. Years ago you would have been right thinking that. Search engines don’t live in the past, at least the ones we care about don’t.

The top search engines tweak their algorithms almost daily and adjust them weekly. If your site is found by the major search engines (the big three are Google, Yahoo, and Live or MSN) the rest will find it also. This is what SEO is all about staying up with the search engines and trying to stay a half step ahead of them.

If the major search engine finds your site on their own it (your website) receives more value than it would if you have to tell them about it. For the sake of clarity let’s say the search engine can assign a maximum value of 100 search love points to a site. All together now “the search engine can assign a maximum value of 100 search love points to a site”. If they find your site on their own you can receive a maximum of 100 search love points. If you have to bring it to their front door you can only receive 80 search love points maximum.

Let’s just take a look at the search engines position…
If this website is really of value wouldn’t I be able to find it without it being brought to my door step? If this site had real value wouldn’t there be a link from another site I have already visited to it?

Doesn’t this argument make sense? This is why it is better to NOT submit your site to search engines through the front door. You need to find ways to have it brought to their attention without waving a flag and yelling “HERE I AM, OVER HERE, I AM RIGHT HERE!”

Are you thinking “Is getting another site to give me a link the only way to get my site found without submitting it to the search engines?” Actually no! You can submit your site to directories which we will deal with next time or now with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer you can have Google and Yahoo bring it in the back door.

Both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer allow you to add a meta tag or page to the root of your site which they verify. This verification process will also get your site on their radar. Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer give you access to some very good tools for your websites SEO.

Give it some thought and I’ll bet you can come up with other ways to get your site on the search engines radar without delivering it your self. Most blog comments allow a link back to your site. Maybe if you can find a blog that deals with the same subject and post a comment you could get a very relative link back to your new site?

Still want to submit your site to search engines? There are plenty of outdated tools and software out there that would be more than glad to take your money to help you do so. Make sure if you are resubmitting your website you have also changed your sites content too.

Now that you have chosen whether or not to submit your site to the search engines you are ready to move to Tip 9 Submitting to Directories (free and paid).

late,
gary pool

This is a post from Gary Pool’s Search Engine Optimizician&trade blog.

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