Search Engine Submission Services - Do They Help?

You've probably seen hundreds of them, search engine submission services that promise to submit your site to thousands of search engines. Why are these search engine submission services worthless? There simply aren't thousands of search engines to submit your site to.

Should you use a search engine submission service?

Anywhere up to 90% of your search engine referrals will come from Google and its partners (YAHOO!, AOL, Earthlink, and a few smaller partners) and MSN. There is no need to submit to Google. Google will find your site on its own if you have links pointing to your site. Once Google finds your site, it will be in the search results on YAHOO!, AOL, and other Google partner sites. Getting your site to show up for your desired keywords involves much more than just getting listed, however. You can use pay per click search engines and buy your way to the top of some engines or you can apply search engine optimization techniques to show up in the (free) editorial results.

It's time consuming but not particularly difficult to gain top rankings in the editorial results. Your rankings depend on many factors including your link popularity (the number and quality of links that point to your site), title tags, headers, website copy, and directory listings. Your success will depend on three primary factors:

• The content of your site
• The number, quality, and format of incoming links
• The technical setup of your website

Several search engines offer you the option to pay them for guaranteed inclusion in their search results.

• AltaVista offers a worthless paid inclusion option
• Ask Jeeves offers a paid inclusion option that may be worth considering
• FAST offers a free submit and a paid inclusion option that may be worth considering
• Inktomi (supplies results on MSN) offers a paid inclusion option that will put your site in the search results on MSN

None of these programs guarantee you any traffic or specific rankings, only that your page will be included along with anywhere up to a billion other pages in the database.

It's also important to submit your site to the major web directories including the Open Directory, YAHOO! and LookSmart or Zeal for non-commercial sites. Since human editors review all these submissions you would never want to entrust these submissions to some cheap search engine submission service.

If you want to learn how to attain top search engine rankings, you've come to the right place. Keyword Marketing Superstar provides most everything you'll need to know. If you really want to use one of those cheap search engine submission services, go right ahead.

If you do use a bulk search engine submission service don't put your real email address in the submission form and don't expect results, there probably won't be any.

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