Do the services that claim to submit your website to thousands of sear

Do the services that claim to submit your website to thousands of search engines really work?
- Brent

This question was answered on March 19, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Getting listed in the search engines is one of the best ways of generating traffic to your website According to the GVU User Survey, 84.6% of all first time visitors to your site will come via a search engine or directory, such as Yahoo! But, which search engines should you try to get listed in? Submitting your site to hundreds or even thousands (as some companies claim) of search engines may sound like it will generate a lot more traffic, but it most likely won’t In reality, 95% of all search engine traffic is generated by a couple of dozen websites

The rest of the “thousands” of search engines that these companies claim are generally not search engines at all, but FFA (Free For All) sites that are “dynamic listings” of websites Most of them simply list the last 50 to 100 sites that have been submitted in a general laundry list, which means your site will generally fall off the list in a short period of time (sometimes less than a day!) To add insult to injury, few web surfers actually use these FFA listing sites for finding things on the Internet, so the resulting traffic from being listed on them is generally negligible

Improper submission by mass-submission houses can also get your site ignored if the company does not follow very specific rules that can actually change every month For instance, submitting more than 1 page from your site per day can cause some search engines to either ignore or actually “blacklist” your site.

In order to be effective in getting and keeping good rankings in the search engines, you must continually update and re-submit your site at least once a month

If you really want to generate traffic to your site, concentrate on getting listed in the following search engines/directories:

About, AltaVista, AOL Search, Fast/All The Web, HotBot, Direct Hit, Excite, Google, Goto, InfoSeek, Iwon, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, NBCi (Formerly Snap), Netscape, Northern Light, WebCrawler and Yahoo.

Over the years, my websites have gotten the most search engine traffic from Google (also Yahoo!’s search engine) and AltaVista This does not mean that they have more users, it simply means that my sites are more suited to the way that these two engines index websites.

Most sites have specific instructions on how to submit your site to the index, so the only thing that you really need is time Before you submit your site to the search engines, however, make sure that an evaluation of your sites “search engine readiness” has been performed before you submit or you may be wasting your time Less than 35% of all websites are properly constructed to ensure that a search engine can properly determine and index the site Sites like <a href="http://www.WebSiteGarage.com" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.WebSiteGarage.com</font></a>can do a free basic evaluation of your site and give you tips on how to improve it If you are going to pay for anything, a search engine readiness analysis performed by a real live human will likely be the most valuable.

Keeping up with the constant changes in the various search engines’ methods is important and sites like <a href="http://www.SearchEngineWatch.com" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.SearchEngineWatch.com</font></a>are great resource for the latest information on them.

The “submit and forget” method is what most webmasters practice, which generally means getting search engine placement “by accident” Unless you are willing to commit to a regular “tweaking” and submission of your site, your chances of generating substantial traffic on a regular basis are not good Remember, you are competing with millions of other websites.