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Do they work and if they do WHO'S the BEST?
i've had many clients mail me about them saying 'apparently my site isn't listed in some of the search engines, why not?'
also i hate their opening sentence 'i came by your site today ......'
</whinge>
Quicker avenue, in addition paid submission to Overture. Overture feeds everyone (SE) that is anyone and needs the extra help.
If after this and your making some returns do Yahoo Web Sites (although asia.yahoo.com currently lets you in for free but if excepted will still take time the propagate the other regional and primary).
I must admit this search engine stuff is making me nuts :) to say the least. My site has been online for approx 31/2 months. I have 300 links so far and I hit the top 10 in lycos and all the web and others and then poof I am gone. Why? If anyone could explain this to me.
As for the companies that promise the best listings I am not so sure, because if you do everything such as meta description, and meta tags, etc....what can they do differently, and some are very costly as well.
So what am I doing wrong here?
Thanks so much
Saffire
First, there is so much variation in what people define as "submission" - it needs some qualifiers.
Submission in it's pure form is the simple submission of a url/urls to search engines. That in and of itself is nothing worth paying for. We have about 5 search engines that are worth your time to submit too. If you are not ready to pay to get listed in the pay-for-spidering engines, then I don't think "submission" in this context is worth it.
If you going to pay for se url inclusion, then that's a different game. It is involved and tricky to submit the right urls and to get them to rank decent in some of the pay-for-spidering engines. That certainly needs some hand holding and in that context, paying someone to manage the right url submissions is worth every penny.
Directory submission can be tricky too and a pro should be consulted by submitting a site to Yahoo and the like. You have to get it right the first time. I've done this stuff for years, and I still occasionally hire a yahoo pro to do a few yahoo submissions because I think it is critical to get it done right the very first time.
If "submission" is defined as complete management and some sort of seo consulting thrown in as some firms describe it, then "submission" can be worth your time. It all depends upon what the extra services are.
If "submission" is defined as complete management and some sort of seo consulting thrown in as some firms describe it, then "submission" can be worth your time. It all depends upon what the extra services are.
Exactly. Blind submission of an unoptimized page or site doesn't "work," and hasn't been worth any worry in the search engine environment as it's existed for the past couple of years. If you're not going to bother to create a site that deserves decent ranking -- or if you're not willing to pay for good PPC positioning -- you may as well not worry about whether to, or how to, submit it.
Good luck with the site and see you next time I'm in NY.
Tony
With one exception, Non Profit Organization are mostly (most dot.org and dot.edu) found in the top listings.
Lots and lots of targeted content and many more unsolicited links. I doubt SEO were use here and the links ... well take care of the submission process.
I think somewhere, someone wrote that the most important listing to attain is that of the ODP (dmoz.org) since this is the foundation for much of the search engines.
DMOZ
GOOGLE
ALTAVISTA
FAST/ALLTHEWEB
...and if you can still find an INKTOMI freebie, then go for it.
WISENUT, EUROSEEK, and all of the second tier engines are also good for link exposure. Their strengths aren't in terms of traffic but in terms of having an inbound link placed on site with a nice amount of content in a category that pertains to your site's theme.
I highly recommend submitting to every freebie you can find that's NOT FFA (free for all).
Stay away from FFAs - they can hurt your strategy more than they can help.
Will concur to that. The task of a seo is to carefully scrutinize all options available and give some hard useful advice. But what does it mean in real life? Some clues:
Is it fraud proof?
This rules out "pay-per-click listings". If you can get paid to read email, it is only a matter of time before you can get paid to surf. I wouldn't trust a PPC listing with a dime....
Is it advertising?
Well, hard to tell but I would include "pay for directory listings" here. And then it is OK. Advertising is a fundamental factor in all developed economies.
Is it a rip-off?
At this time, "pay-for-spidering" sounds like it. I may be wrong...
What about the future?
There may be completely new ways of organizing the web in the future. This is where a webmaster can make a difference....
There are some good (and free) tools for auto submission to lots of small directories, this probably helps your PR if not providing many visitors.
I find the submission services simply get you to fill out a form with generalized details about your site, then it attempts to 'plug them in' where it can find a space - more times than not, unintelligently and requiring assistance (especially in the case with ones like SubmitIt!). So if you have to hold its hand as its submitting to all of the engines, wouldn't that time be better spent, doing it yourself so you can optimize your submission for each. And then using the money you would have spent on the submission service, to pay for (or to put towards) the cost of a pay for inclusion engine.
Some engines you really need to get it right the first time or its difficult to change it after first submitted. Also, since most of the major engines are pay per submission or per click, how many of the valuable engines can a submission service really submit to any more? When I went through the list of all the ones that SubmitIt offered, I realized that only a small percentage of the many search engines that it advertised were actually applicable to my site, and I assume for anyone elses. Example, whole sections on business engines, when your site is an entertainment site make that 10% or whatever engines usless to you, so by the end, only 20% of the hundreds it offers are actually useful to you. Even worse, is many of the advertised sites are geographically specific, so if your site is based in the USA, the 10 search engines specific to Taiwan are hardly useful. And then there is that other 10% of the engines that, in a word, suck. When you look at them during the submission process, it makes you wonder why you are even bothering.
Sooooo, do it yourself and save the money. A real frugal but effective way of getting a search engine list is by going to one of the search engine submission sites, going through their list of engines they claim to submit to, and visit the engines yourself! They literally give you the info you need to know, without having to shell over the money for some brainless piece of code to submit your carefully crafted site to the worlds search engines. Being a search engine webmater myself, I know that many of these submission services and programs incorrectly submit, and cause engine administrators very big headaches with submissions services that have out of date methods of filling in submission form fields, etc. Trust me, one night of dilligent submitting and you can do more than you think on your own!
Hope that helped! :)
"If it's not worth a manual submission, then it's not worth submitting to."
Aren't you interested in WHO you're submitting to, WHAT types of sites they index, and WHERE they place you?
I sure hope so. :)
No mass submission ANYTHING can successfully list you in the proper category on every engine since most engines have different, evolving, category structures which would be nearly impossible to keep track of though a mass submission program or web site.
(edited by: HyperGeek at 8:09 pm (utc) on May 30, 2002)
Some of the search engine submission programs just submit you to FFAs and not useful directories (i.e. geographically specific).
I did a study on one such service (if you want their name, contact me off-list) and discovered that, while they boasted 4,000 search engines and directories, only 130 were real. The others were FFAs, dead, or geo-specific sites like CyberEthiopia.
