Getting Traffic - Submitting to Relevancy Search Engines

[SEOnetworker]

In the early days of the Internet, many sites wanted to provide search engine services. There were dozens and dozens of them, and each search engine had their own internal proprietary database. For instance, when you went to Excite and performed a search there, the search results only displayed sites from Excite’s database. When you performed a search at AltaVista, the site displayed all of AltaVista’s search results. Lycos displayed Lycos results, InfoSeek displayed InfoSeek results, and so on.

However, in recent years there has been a dramatic consolidation of search engines. There are fewer search engines today, and most of them now obtain their results from a handful of key search results providers known as Search Indexes.

Today there are only 6 search indexes. These six indexes sell their data to all other search engines on the Web. In other words, you don’t’ need to worry about all the hundreds of search engines out there. You only need to worry about the six search indexes. If you are in those six, you are automatically everywhere. The list below includes the six indexes and an estimate of their market share, to give you some perspective.

* Google - Google is the largest index on the web by far with about 65% market share and growing. Google powers such notable search engines as Google, AOL, Netscape, and many others.
* Yahoo - Yahoo’s index is called "Inktomi" and has about a 20% market share. Yahoo powers Yahoo, All the Web, Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot and many others.
* MSN - MSN has about 10% market share and powers MSN & Live.
* Ask - Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) owns a database called "Teoma." It has about a 3% market share, and it powers Ask, Teoma.com, Iwon, and a few others.
* Wisenut - Wisenut powers itself, and has a market share far below 1%. It is an insignificant search index, but is included in the interest of being thorough.
* Cuil - The newest search engine/index is trying to carve out a place for itself is Cuil. Cuil.com was launched in Late July of 2008, and has a miniscule market share at this point. Whether this search index becomes important remains to be seen.

How Search Engines Find Your Site
There are basically three ways that relevancy search engines learn about your website to list it in their search results. Listed in order of desirability, they are:

Links - All major relevancy search indexes actively "crawl" the web. They do this by sending robot programs throughout the Internet looking for new websites. They find new sites by re-visiting sites already in their index and looking for new links that have been added since the last visit. If the link is to a new website, then that search engine will visit the site and add it to their index. All this happens automatically. Getting found through links is absolutely the best option! But, this requires some work in getting other sites to link to you. The absolute fastest and best approach to get found by major search engines is to use the Social Bookmarking strategy. If you get links to your site through social bookmarking sites, all of the search indexes will find you within a few days.
Sitemap Submission -Most major relevancy search indexes now accept direct sitemap submissions. However, the format for sitemaps is different for each relevancy search index. In the future, there will probably be some type of sitemap standardization across the search indexes. For now, you should investigate each index’s format before building and submitting a sitemap to the search index. However, getting found through links is by far the better approach.
Direct Submission -To directly submit your website, access the submission page for each major search index, enter your web address, and submit the information. That is all it takes. Details on how to do this for each search index are listed later in this article. Please understand, however, that this information is included in the interest of being thorough. Direct submission to search engines is a waste of time. You are much better off building links; this way the search indexes will find and include you in days. If you submit directly, listing may take months.

Submitting vs Linking
Which method provides the best results? Without a doubt, getting found through links is a far superior method for getting listed in search engines. Search engines function much differently than they used to. They have experienced so many abusive submissions from over-eager website owners and search engine submission services, that they have gradually given less and less priority to submitted websites. Instead, they give strong preference to sites they find through links. If you do decide to submit your site directly to the search engines, remember the following tips:

Bulk Submissions -Do not hire a service to bulk submit your website to the main search engines. These services can get you blacklisted by some search indexes. There are some reputable search engine specialty companies, but they need to do more for you than just bulk submit your site to the search engines!

Delayed Listings -Search engines that receive a direct submission assign your website the lowest priority in the list of sites they are adding to their search indexes. Websites that submit directly can wait on the list for many months depending on the search index.
Build Links

So, if you don’t submit directly to search engines what do you do? Build Links. This is a fundamental website promotion technique that you should be doing anyway. Use these strategies to build links:

* Social Bookmarking
* Submitting to Live Directories
* Free Vertical Portals
* Malls & Shopping Directories
* Coupon Portals
* Classified Ads

If you initiate just some of these link building strategies after your website goes live, all of the major search indexes will find you, they will find you much more quickly (it is possible to get indexed within days or weeks) and they will treat your site more favorably with respect to your search rank. Don’t bulk submit, build links instead, and everything will take care of itself.

Submitting To Relevancy Search Engines
Because most search engines get their search results from other providers (Search Indexes), there are actually only a few engines to which you should submit your new website. These engines are listed in the following section with applicable links and instructions.

Google -Google powers its own relevancy searches, as well as many other search engines on the Internet.

* Getting Listed: Use Google Sitemaps, be listed through link trading, submit to Google directly (www.google.com/addurl).

Yahoo! -Yahoo gets their search results from Inktomi (Yahoo owns Inktomi). The default search for Yahoo is their "Web" search, which displays the top 4 Bidded Listings at the top of the page under "Sponsored Listings."

* Getting Listed: Submit to Yahoo (Suggest a Site to Yahoo!) or be listed through link trading.

MSN -MSN is powered by its own search index. It also powers Live.com (MSN’s new search engine which is increasing in popularity).

* Getting Listed: Submit to MSN (Suggest a Site to MSN) or be listed through link trading.

Teoma -The Teoma search Index powers Ask.com (Formerly known as Ask Jeeves).

* You cannot submit directly to Teoma (Ask.com). The only way to get indexed is to build links and get listed naturally.

Cuil.com -You cannot submit directly to Cuil. The only way to get indexed is to build links and get listed naturally.

Checking to See if You Are Included In the Index
To verify that your site is in the index, simply go to each of the major six indexes, which you can do by visiting any search engine powered by that index, and search for yourdomainname.com. If you are in the index, you will see your site appearing in the results.

Since these six search indexes power all search engines on the internet, if you can ensure that your site is included in them, you will be included in all of the major search engines as well as all of the smaller ones. That’s all there is to getting listed in the relevancy search engines. Check back with each search index about once a quarter to make sure your site is still listed. If you have done a good job of building links, you don’t even need to worry about this step. If you somehow get dropped, your site will get found again quickly.

Brian Marshall
Get The Bar
O.A.R.S.
B.S.I.O.

[GerryIM]

Good post - very comprehensive.

If you get indexed by Google then you have pretty much covered your bases.

[flashgordonweb]

Excellent article, comprehensive and well written. I agree with GerryIM, however, in that if Google or Yahoo are indexing you, then so are the others.

[dave1]

yes - most of the others get their results from google anyway

[waxman1000]

There is just one thing that all webmasters should be aware of. if you get indexed by Google, then you are doing the right thing. many people try to use all sorts of tricky SEO techniques and end up being penalized by Google.
i can assure you that if you do the very basics, you will get indexed.

There are 2 things to take note when doing all the tricky SEO techniques.
what really counts is with Google is:

Your backlinks and your website content. if you have these right, then you will rank high. forget all the useless tricks i see today on the internet.

[Ron Killian]

I don't submit my sites to the search engines, much better for them to find you.

[GerryIM]

Originally Posted by waxman1000

There is just one thing that all webmasters should be aware of. if you get indexed by Google, then you are doing the right thing. many people try to use all sorts of tricky SEO techniques and end up being penalized by Google.
i can assure you that if you do the very basics, you will get indexed.

There are 2 things to take note when doing all the tricky SEO techniques.
what really counts is with Google is:

Your backlinks and your website content. if you have these right, then you will rank high. forget all the useless tricks i see today on the internet.

Yes - so true. Backlinks and content make a big difference for getting results from Google.

However, this does not mean that other points are not useful.

What about Image Tags? They tell the search engines what your images are about and certainly pick up visitors.

I wrote a post on 8 ways to Optimize your website if you are interested.

8 Easy Ways To Optimize Your Website

This will help you get the basics.