You've probably seen adverts promising to submit your web site to "one million" (or similar astronomical numbers) search engines.
When you think about these ads, it should raise two questions:
1. Are there really "one million" engines?
2. Do you really need to be listed in a lot of these sites?
Here's our opinion:-
- There are probably a few hundred (?), real, general-purpose, search engines, as well as some more that focus on specialist topics (example: one which only contains sites relating to the chemical industry). (If you want to make your own assessment of the number, I'd suggest that you try looking in DMOZ to get an idea of how many search sites they list).
- There are some more search-sites which do not have their own search technology but simply display results from one or more other engines. (so you probably can't separately submit to these anyway)
- When you search the web, you probably use one of the leading search sites or portals like Yahoo!, Altavista, or Google, etc. So, probably, do your friends, so do their friends... and so on!
The obvious questions are:
- If few people are searching in one of the lesser search sites, is there much point in being listed there?
- And how can a submission service claim one million then? Of course, it does depend on what you count as a "search engine", but some submission services could increase the number that they count by, for example, including Free For All Links (FFA) pages.
Some experts in SEO recommending optimizing their site for just a few of the leading search engines and not even bothering with the rest. Why? Because they believe that a sustained high rank, for a popular keyword, on any one of the leading portals could generate lots of traffic.
Summary
If you want to: go ahead submit to one million "search engines".
Or you could: narrow your focus - and concentrate on getting listed, and high ranked, in the top few dozen.
| By S. Tanna. First published at http://www.searchenginerocket.com/submit/issues_onemillion.html Get more free search engine optimization and marketing tips & advice at http://www.searchenginerocket.com/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sunil_Tanna |
