Web Site Submission – What Are the Benefits?
Some people will tell you that submitting your site to a search engine is a difficult, time consuming task and has limited benefits. Not true. Web site submission is an important way to accelerate the discovery of your website. Moreover, it’s not as difficult as some make it out to be.
First, let’s look at the benefits. It’s easy. Forrester Research, a national research firm that studies consumer behavior, recently determined that 81% of consumers use a search engine to find the products or services they want. So the benefit is easy to understand: 4 out of 5 consumers look at a search engine first. If you’re not on a search engine, kiss of 81% of actively inquiring consumers and take a chance that they’ll find you some other way.
Second, what’s it take to do a search engine submission? Some will tell you it takes hours and hours of near-death boredom to submit your site to the several thousand sites around the web. This is both true and false. The false part is that there are only three general purpose search engines that matter: Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. Sites like Ask Jeeves, Netscape, AOL and Altavista all source many of their results from these three sites. The true part is that there are hundreds and hundreds of country-specific sites and hundreds and hundreds of language-specific sites also. On top of that there are tens of thousands of special web-site, vertical search engines. To submit to all of these would certainly make web site submission a long and tedious process.
As a result, most people will focus on the big three, and then cherry-pick through specialty sites that are important to their marketing. There are benefits to web site submission and not least is that it’s fairly easy to do. Simply package up your site and submit it directly to a search engine. There no more to it than that.
Some people will tell you that submitting your site to a search engine is a difficult, time consuming task and has limited benefits. Not true. Web site submission is an important way to accelerate the discovery of your website. Moreover, it’s not as difficult as some make it out to be.
First, let’s look at the benefits. It’s easy. Forrester Research, a national research firm that studies consumer behavior, recently determined that 81% of consumers use a search engine to find the products or services they want. So the benefit is easy to understand: 4 out of 5 consumers look at a search engine first. If you’re not on a search engine, kiss of 81% of actively inquiring consumers and take a chance that they’ll find you some other way.
Second, what’s it take to do a search engine submission? Some will tell you it takes hours and hours of near-death boredom to submit your site to the several thousand sites around the web. This is both true and false. The false part is that there are only three general purpose search engines that matter: Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. Sites like Ask Jeeves, Netscape, AOL and Altavista all source many of their results from these three sites. The true part is that there are hundreds and hundreds of country-specific sites and hundreds and hundreds of language-specific sites also. On top of that there are tens of thousands of special web-site, vertical search engines. To submit to all of these would certainly make web site submission a long and tedious process.
As a result, most people will focus on the big three, and then cherry-pick through specialty sites that are important to their marketing. There are benefits to web site submission and not least is that it’s fairly easy to do. Simply package up your site and submit it directly to a search engine. There no more to it than that.
