Is Search Engine Submission Necessary?

A simple question which can be answered quickly; no it isn’t. We could leave it there as we have answered the question but that’s taking the easy way out. The fact remains that there are many who still consider submitting to search engines as somewhat of a holy grail and think their businesses cannot survive without it. These poor, naïve souls would be better off spending their time on what really does matter as far as search engines today are concerned; ensuring their websites contain the best possible content and internal links.

Search engine optimisation is unrecognisable from what it was a decade ago when keywords were used to move you up the rankings. Page one now is all paid submissions, everyone knows that and a huge chunk of these companies marketing budget goes on this. SEO is not dead by any means, it has merely shifted direction in the way the web crawlers do their searching.

In the search of publicly available web pages the crawlers scan through these pages and follow the links within them. They go from one link to another and send all this data back to the servers. This process highlights the important of links as they will travel throughout your website via the links indexing as they go and the more data they collect from a site the higher its ranking will be.

In theory, the owner of a website shouldn’t have to hunt around for where links can be made, this is where content comes into play. If your web copy is interesting, useful and important the placement of links should present themselves naturally to you. As this is the basis of the Google algorithm regarding page ranking content and links rule OK.

In all honesty you aren’t doing your site any harm by submitting your website to a search engine. It doesn’t take long if you only submit to the big guns but one submission is enough. Despite their claims to the contrary it won’t mean your site gets crawled more frequently, or any quicker. There is no cost involved with submitting your site to Google, MSN, Yahoo et al as we stated earlier those at the top of the rankings have paid to be there as a form of advertising.

Think of the Internet as a form of sat nav. You wouldn’t travel to an unknown area without getting directions yet this is what people do every day online. They try to build their online presence without having any real idea in which direction they are going. With their website wallowing somewhere in the bowels of the search engines and people coming across their site more by chance than anything else they invariably blame the Internet for letting them down.

Due to their lack of SEO savvy, or being stuck back in the 90’s and still thinking keywords are king, or both, they have been lost in the shuffle and without taking the latest rules onboard their site will forever remain that needle in a haystack.