Search
Engine Submission: The Myth
I get those SPAM emails every other day. You know the
ones, "Submit your website to 500,000 search engines".
I'm not exaggerating. 500,000. Fantastic! What a deal, and
only
$20 a month!
Of course, having studied and worked in search engine tuning
and optimisation of websites, I know that submission is only
a small part of the process: you have to have a site tuned
so that each search engine will be able to digest and then
rate
your site highly when they do visit.
Curiosity got the better of me, I set my instinct to
delete the mail aside for a minute and went on their site.
This was mainly because I was fascinated to see what
the other 499,992 search engines are; the ones not in
the top eight that account
for
96% of all search engine traffic. At the very least, I thought
it would be amusing to see where your website promoting a
UK local or national business might end up if you did entrust
the job to one of these operations.
Let's suppose, for a moment, you are a property management
company based in Plymouth, or Edinburgh, and you want people
to find your website. How would you fare if you used these
services?
I wondered too. I suspected the worst and I was not disappointed.
The exercise quickly reminded me exactly why 96% of
people use the top
8 engines.
Fortunately they gave a list of engines they guaranteed
you would be listed on. What about SearchBoston for
example? You would certainly be in a class of your own
trying to promote an Edinburgh business with an entry in
this directory of businesses in Boston Massachusetts
USA. Or what about Web Wombat,
the Australian-only search engine. Or Viola -
I couldn't figure that one out at all. Zebra (South Africa)
also just showed websites in southern africa. The list goes
on and on... Notice the pattern emerging?
The big guys - the Googles and MSNs of the world - have
the power and capacity to index billions of websites. They
may have their own approach, usually commercially driven,
but generally they give their visitors what they are looking
for. The little guys don't have the power, so offer a very
focused list,
narrowed down by subject, or more often locality to a much
smaller list that they can support. It makes complete sense.
It also makes a mockery of the idea that you are going to
get anything out of a listing on one of these specialised
websites, unless you are in that locality and line of business.
So if there is a conclusion to be drawn here, it is that
submitting your site to huge numbers of search engines is
a waste. Getting seen by the major players, and being indexed
by them so that your site appears when someone enters keywords
that are relevant to your business is the important thing.
To do this, your website and the pages in it must be structured
in such a way to make this easy for the engines.
On top of
this foundation, and particularly in the case of highly
competitive keywords, there are a number of ways to boost
your entries to higher positions, but these should be used
with great care as many of these techniques are just on the
border between the permissible and abuse in the eyes of the search
engine companies. Many of the services that aggressively market themselves a search engine optimisation experts are either portals, or are relying on tricks; recent history has seen many of these appear and disappear, and if you use them, when they go, they will take you with them. There is unfortunately no easy way to get
listed in search engines: it takes effort and understanding of the rules.
This is why Beechwood offers a Web Positioning Service.
Talk to us!
We are based in Edinburgh Scotland, Plymouth in SW England and London, with clients
in throughout the UK.
Call now for advice on 0870 739 1000 |
