If you are paying to have your site submitted to search engines, you are wasting your money! Even worse, you may have your site banned from some of them. I’m sure you’ve seen kind of pitches these before:
“Submit Your Site to Over 312600 Search Engines”
“Submit your site to 148 major search engines in one click”
312,600 search engines, 148 search engines! What a joke – save your money!
You need to concern yourself with only four search engines. That’s right, only 4. And even then, you can safely ignore two of them and still get the vast majority of relevant search traffic to your site.
Google and Yahoo accounted for over three quarters of all searches carried out in the US in April. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s MSN/Windows Live Search service came in a far-away third, with 9 percent of the market
The stats in the UK are even more slanted towards Google. (It’s hard to find data for the Irish market because it’s so small, but the UK is a good indicator).
I’m sure you’re convinced at this point, and the exact statistics are not important. Let’s see how to get your site listed!
First of all, you don’t HAVE to submit your site. If the site has incoming links from other sites that are already listed in the search engines then the search engine will find it automatically, no action necessary!
Submitting your site to the top search engines
If you really want to submit your site to the top 5 search engines then here’s how:
- Google – submit your web address here
- Yahoo – submit your web address here
- MSN/Live.com – submit your web address here
- Ask.com – create a sitemap and then follow the instructions here
- AOL – no submission necessary! (AOL search is powered by Google)
If you do not have any incoming links then you need to start link building (you should do this anyway). We can help!
I hope you found this article helpful, please give your feedback via the comments form below – thanks!