Some of the top web marketing companies in South Africa offer to submit your website to a huge number of search engines – like 2,000 or more. Does this actually work?
There are actually only 3 search engines which are of any importance – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Together, these 3 get around 95% of all search traffic. The other 1,997 share the remaining 5%, and submitting to them is basically a waste of time. Most of them get their search results from one of the big three anyway.
What?s more, the search engines are all set up to search the net for new sites. They find them by following links from existing sites which have already been indexed. The more incoming links there are to your site, the better.
If you really want to, you can submit your site manually to the top three – but many search engine optimization experts believe that it?s better to simply let the search engines find your website naturally.
There?s also no advantage in submitting your site to the same search engine multiple times – you stand a good chance of being banned if you do this (or if someone does it for you).
There are more effective ways to get indexed by the search engines, and I?ll look at some of them over the coming days.