Starfire Creative Web Design | Graphic Design | Web Hosting | Search Engine Optimization | Online Marketing

SEO Mistake #4: Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Chances are, if you’ve been a member of an online business or SEO related forum for long, you’ll have witnessed a heated discussion about whether or not you should submit your site to the search engines. If you’re really new to having your own website, you might not have a clue what this means.

Submitting your site to a search engine is a process in which you go to the search engine’s website and fill out a form, telling the search engine what the address is to your website and what keywords are relevant to it.

Sounds simple, fast and harmless, right? That’s exactly what proponents 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 hundreds of dollars with no real return on investment.

Why?

The Truth about Search Engines

First, there are only four search engines. Any other site that calls itself a search engine these days simply returns 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).

Once your website is known to be trustworthy and has aged a bit, your pages will appear in the SERPs for relevant keyword phrases. This happens even if you never submit your site to a search engine. And submitting will not speed up the process.

Impact on Your Business

So what does this mean for you, the small business owner who just wants to earn a living?

This means:

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 industry or relevant industries. A website owner who knows, likes and trusts you is more likely to link to you in the content of his website.
4. Make sure you’re meeting your customers’ needs first.
5. Never do anything for SEO purposes alone.

Keep these five guidelines in mind when making changes or additions to your site or building your new site.

Stay tuned for next week's SEO article. Or, stop by the new website of Volition and get your own personalized site review and SEO quote.