Domain Names for Sale, Parking optimization, My Portfolio

Cheap Registras Welcome to part seven in this ten-part search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of human testing. In part seven we will cover the best practices of website submissions, where to submit your website to, and how to do so.

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Name Com With services offering to help you get more traffic and higher search engine positioning by submitting your website to "18 Bazillion Search Engines For Just $19.95 Per Month!" and other such claims, there has grown much confusion around website submissions. In this article we will clear up many of the misconceptions around submitting your website and may even save you "Just $19.95 Per Month!" in the process.

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Godaddy Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

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Parked Com The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. 
   
2. Keyword Selection
3. 
   
4. Content Creation
5. 
   
6. Site Structure
7. 
   
8. Optimization
9. 
   
10. Internal Linking
11. 
    
12. Human Testing
13. 
    
14. Submissions
15. 
    
16. Link Building
17. 
    
18. Monitoring
19. 
    
20. The Extras
21. 
    

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Domain Porfolios Step Seven - Website Submissions

Sell Us Your Domains Go to Portfolio Acquisitions to contact us about selling us your domain portfolio. Help Click Help if you need rmation at any time. hand columns. BuyDomain' What is a Domain Name A domain name uniquely identifies a website. Typing a domain name (also called a URL) into your browser allows you to visit that site.

Domains For Sale While there are definitely more critical areas of the website optimization process there is perhaps no area subject to as much misinformation and to such a vast audience. Here are some common misconceptions that are often believed about search engine submissions:

1. 
   
2. You need to submit your website often to keep it indexed by the search engines
3. 
   
4. You need to submit your website to thousands and thousands of search engines to get decent traffic
5. 
   
6. Submitting your website often will keep you at the top of the search engine rankings
7. 
   

Domain Optimizing These beliefs are all incorrect and those who can make a quick buck selling this disservice perpetrate them. If you have not recently received an email offering to "Submit Your Website To More Search Engines Than There Are Websites On The Internet For Just $19.95 Per Month!" then I can pretty much guarantee that you will in the not-too-distant future if your email can be found somewhere on your website.

Domain Resellers An irony of this can be found in Google's webmaster area where they note:

Namepros Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

Domain Parking "Dear google.com,

Cheap Registras I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Name Com Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

Godaddy Good advice as I'm sure Google has their website submissions taken care of. Just because you receive such an email, doesn't mean that you're missing out on anything. Let's first look at a breakdown of which engines are responsible for which traffic.

Parked Com According to research the major search engines are responsible for the following percentages of traffic as of June 2004:

Domain Porfolios Google - 41.6%

Domains For Sale Yahoo - 31.5%

Domain Optimizing MSN - 27.4% (MSN draws their results from Yahoo!/Overture)

Domain Resellers AOL - 13.6% (AOL draws their results from Google)

Namepros Ask Jeeves - 7.0%

Domain Parking Lycos - 3.7%

Cheap Registras Netscape - 3.0% (Netscape draws their results from Google)

Name Com AltaVista - 2.7% (AltaVista draws the Yahoo!/Overture)

Godaddy Source: Neilson/Netratings
Note: These numbers total over 100% as people may use multiple search engines if they don't find the information they are looking for at the first one they try.

Parked Com So what does this tell us? This tells us that the very vast majority of search engine traffic does not come from many thousands of search engines but rather, relatively few. This would lead to the obvious questions, "Is it worth paying to be submitted to thousands of search engines?" The real answer, "No."

Domain Porfolios Then How Do I Submit My Own Website?

Domains For Sale Automated search engine submission systems simply access the existing and readily accessible "Add URL" pages of the search engines and automatically submit your site. You can do this yourself simply by visiting the search engines and submitting through these same pages.

Domain Optimizing To simplify this process you can visit the "search engines" page on the Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning website where we link directly to the submissions pages of the major engines.

Domain Resellers But What About The Other Engines? Surely They Provide Some Traffic?

Namepros Quite honestly, they may. You may get a visitor or two. Is it worth $19.95/mth or some such amount? No. You can get a better dollar/visitor ratio on any of the many PPC engines out there.

Domain Parking An additional point to note is that you may want to actually visit some of the lists of engines on the sites offering these services to you. You will discover a couple of important facts:

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• Many of these so-called "search engines" are not engines at all but rather FFA (Free-For-All) pages and classified ads sites. They will not help your rankings, you will not see traffic from them and your listing will probably last about as long as spam in your Inbox.
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• Many of the actual search engines and directories are topical. What this means is that they are focused on a single area and unless your site coincidentally is about space exploration, topographical mapping, etc. you won't get listed. Submitting should not be confused with "guaranteed listing". Submitting your site to thousands of engines is not the same as getting your website indexed on thousands of engines.
• 
  

Cheap Registras The Submission Myth

Name Com The truth of that matter is, submitting your website at all can realistically be considered a waste of time. Aside from a few key general directories (DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.) and a number of SEO directories, we did not submit the website www.beanstalk-inc.com to any of the major search engines. It's true, not a single submission.

Godaddy Are we indexed? Yes we are.

Parked Com How did we get indexed without submitting our site? If you take the time that you would be spending submitting your site and spend it instead finding quality inbound links (which we will write about next week) your site will be indexed and much quicker than you think.

Domain Porfolios You've probably heard the term "search engine spider". Search engines crawl websites. This means that they visit a page, follow all the links on that page and so on. If you have a link on a website that is already known to the search engines it is only a matter of time before your website will be found by default. If fact, when the Beanstalk site went live and the first link was established to it, it did not take the weeks that are estimated through the use of the submissions pages for our site to be found. The homepage of beanstalk-inc.com was index by Google three days after the site went live and the other major engines followed within a week or so.

Domains For Sale Final Notes

Domain Optimizing If there are any points that I hope you take away from this article they are the following:

1. 
   
2. Automated search engine submissions services are not worth the money they charge.
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4. You do not need to be submitted to thousands of "search engines". The vast majority of traffic comes from the top few.
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6. You will want to consider whether it is even worth the time to submit to search engines or whether that time could be better spent building quality, relevant links to your site and submitting your site to the major and topical directories.
7. 
   

Domain Resellers An additional failing to the automated submissions systems not covered above is their inability to take into consideration the exact characteristics of your website for their directory submissions. When you're submitting your website to directories you will have to choose the exact category your site falls into. Most directories have slightly different category hierarchies and the more exact you are in your submission, the higher the chance you will be listed. Automated systems can never be as exact across multiple directories as a human can.

Namepros Submitting your website, even correctly, will not guarantee you top rankings however it will leave you with money in your pocket to spend on other promotional endeavors that may actually produce a solid ROI. And THAT'S what it's all about.

Domain Parking The rankings? You'll have to read the other nine steps of the series to find out how to attain those.

Cheap Registras Next Week

Name Com In part eight of this search engine positioning series we will cover the importance of link building, how to attain high quality, relevant links to your website, and the tools to reduce the time it take to do so significantly. With the importance of inbound links to your overall rankings you won't want to miss this very important step in the website optimization process.

Godaddy Dave Davies is the CEO of the SEO services firm Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. Beanstalk provides guaranteed search engine positioning and SEO consulting services to clients from around the world. If you're more interested in doing it yourself please visit our SEO news blog to keep updated on the latest goings-on in the search engine world.

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