Submit to 100 Search Engines?

Convinced that search engine submissions are the way to go? Well, we need to talk because I have some swamp land in Florida you will definitely be interested in buying! The truth is, buying swamp land, or drinking 2 tablespoons of snake oil, will help your search engine rankings just as much as submitting to a billion search engines!

There are oodles of search engine submission services out there who will say anything, do anything, and promise anything to make unsuspecting webmasters, who haven't done their homework, believe that submitting to engines is the way to get high rankings. Folks, it simply is not true. Let's take a look at what all these submission services do, why you should not buy their bunk, and what you really should do to get the attention of the search engines.

Submission Services- what do they do?

Search engine submission services offer the grande service of submitting your website to many, many search engines. They submit your site to as few as 25 and as many as 100,000,000+ engines. Although a few actually claim to go the trouble of submitting by hand, most proudly advertise the use of automatic submission tools. As for the latter, if you don't want to use their services, they will gladly sell you the rights to their automated tools. Now, you may be interested to know that some of them actually re-submit your site monthly, weekly, or even daily! No doubt, these are the cream of the Submit Swamp crop!

Regardless of what they offer, every submission service feels their best selling feature is their ability to boost your website rankings by submitting to tons of engines. I respectfully disagree. In my personal opinion, their most endearing feature is their genuine understanding of their own worth. They all sell their services and their tools really cheap! I bet if you ask nicely, most of them will even throw in their souls for no extra charge!

Maybe really cheap doesn't do justice to a whole 700,000+ search engines for ONLY 19.90! Even the poorest webmaster can afford their services. Those of you are interested in their submission services, please don't hesitate to contact me! I'll gladly send you the e-mail addresses and urls of all the top submit services, a contract for the swamp land for sale, and as an added bonus, I'll even throw in 2 bottles of snake oil! (Our snake oil comes in 2 flavors: cherry and peppermint. Please indicate your flavor preference in your e-mail. All of our snake oil was developed in the Submit Swamp which means, as you probably already know, it is guaranteed to boost your search engine ranking!)

Submit to 100 Engines- don't believe the bunk!

Let's think this through::

How many search engines are there anyway?
I don't know about you, but I can only think of a few that matter a great deal: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL. AskJeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, and maybe a few more. But don't take my word for it, let's look at the stats.

The top 5 search engines take up almost 100% of the search engine market, according to Neilsen and many other credible sources.

• Google - 36%
• Yahoo! - 25%
• MSN - 14%
• AOL - 5%
• Ask Jeeves - 5%

Since you are interested in being found by your target audience, you should carefully consider that your target audience is NOT searching in some obscure search engine that nobody has ever heard of (except the submission services, of course)! They are searching in one of the top 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

The question is, why do you need to be submitted to a billion or even 100 search engines when there are less than 10 engines that people actually use? The answer is, you don't!

How Search Engines Index and Rank Sites- really!

Instead of getting into a lot of boring technical jargon, I'll keep this as simple as possible.

How search engines index sites -
Search engines play an active role in filling their own indexes, they do not sit around waiting for webmasters to sumbit their site(s). A search engine finds sites by using what is known as a spider (or crawler). Crawling the web from one link to the next, the spider finds every webpage it can. Once it finds a webpage, the page is scheduled for indexing.

Links will get your site indexed. - Let me explain. If the spider finds your site through links on other websites, the search engine will soon index your site. The more links that take the spider to your site, the better. Once it finds your site, it will naturally start to crawl your site, from one link to the next, soon indexing all the pages within your site.

Just to drive this home, take a look at a quote taken from Google here:

"Google is a fully automated search engine, which employs robots known as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process does not involve human editors, it is NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed are not manually submitted for inclusion."

How search engines rank sites -
As the spider goes about its duty of crawling the web to find sites, it also takes note of certain important factors that are later used for ranking purposes. The most important factors are: the keyword relevance of your site, how many other sites are linking to your site and the quality and relevance of the sites linking to you.

Lots of relevant content and inbound links will help you rank high. Let me explain. A search engine might return millions of results for a search on " blue widgets". Since they want the people using their engine to get good results, they don't throw the results out there randomly. They rank them according to relevance. They base that relevance greatly on links and content. Sites that have lots of relevant " blue widgets" content, along with lots of links from other sites that are relevant, have a better chance of ranking high for "blue widgets".

The Bottom Line

• There are less than 10 search engines that people actually use.
• You do not need to submit to any search engine.
• Search engines find sites by using spiders to crawl the web.
• Getting links from other sites will get you in the index.
• Search engines rank sites based on relevance.
• **To rank high you need lots of relevant content and lots of links from other relevant sites.**