1000s of search egines? Get real!

If you are tracking your visitor statistics using Google Analytics or similar you will have very useful information at your finger tips. What I want you to do right now is to go to your Analytics account and look at your ‘Traffic Sources‘ and find the ‘search engines‘ data.

The screen-shot below was taken from my Analytics account:

How many search engines can you see?

Other than the different country variants (we are happily read across the globe) the search engines in the list are Google, Yahoo and Aol. Google has the largest share of the search engine market so having them as the main referring search engine in our site statistics is typical.

Now, can you see these 1000s of search engines in your referral stats?

I didn’t think you would!

Last question, the last time you used a search engine… which one did you use?

Returning to the claims of the search engine submissions services:

We submit your website to the search engines on a monthly basis.

Oh come on!

The big players of search, Google, Yahoo and Bing, do not need to be reminded that your website exists. If you are paying an on-going fee for such a service please terminate your payment!

Continually submitted your website to ‘anywhere’ may get you and your business website listed as a spammer.

I don’t want to confuse anyone and I understand that you may be left wondering what you should do to alert the search engines when you launch a new website .

The simple answer is that you can do NOTHING!

Google, Yahoo and Bing are powered by super computers that WILL find your website.

You can speed things up by getting some quality inbound links from authority websites pointing directly to your website. One thing you should be doing is adding your XML Sitemap to Google so that they know what pages on your website are important to you. In doing this you may also make Google aware of pages that they have not yet indexed.

You can add your Sitemap by registering your account with Google Webmaster Tools. If you do not have an XML Sitemap you can use this free tool to have one created in a very short space of time.

You can also do the same with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center.

With this information in hand please do not pay for a search engine submission service for your business website (or any other website for that matter), the search engines will find you.

Final words, read what Google have to say about submitting your website to them (this does not include registering your site with Webmaster tools but is talking about the sumbit URL method.)

To your success,

Karl Foxley