July 26, 2006 by Lee.

In my quest to understand SEO (as mentioned in my previous post - btw, this is not a continuation of the last post, it’s just a rant about a similar topic), I learned the hard way how NOT to submit my website to the right search engines. As I read more and more about how important adding my URL to various Search Engines is to the general traffic of a website, I quickly found sites that specialized in such tasks. They promised to submit my URL to various search engines if I placed their link somewhere on my website. Some of them were great. However, several sites promised something that I didn’t really think about at the time. They promised to submit my website to 100,000 or more search engines. Since it was free, and since I felt like the other sites were delivering as promised, I entered my information in their form. That was a big mistake. Instead of the usual, thank you for submitting your URL with us… I got lots and lots of spam. At the time, I had no clue as to what FFA meant, but I was getting tired of the spam mail I was getting. Of course, they all claimed to be ICANN-Spam compliant and so they weren’t really spammers. But I feel like like they are worse (even if they include the opt-out link in the email, though not always). So I researched a bit more and learned something from my mistake…

Are there thousands of search engines? Some people promise to submit your website to 50,000 or even 100,000 search engines. There aren’t thousands of search engines on the Internet. The majority of these so called “search engines” are known mostly as Free For All (FFA) link pages or special interest web pages. Do not make the mistake like me. Submitting your webpage to thousands of FFA sites means that you’ll end up with thousands of spam email messages. In addition, this will hurt your ranking in many search engines (since you will be labeled as a SPAMMER). Learn from me…

There’s only a handful of search engines that can really bring visitors to your website. You should concentrate on the important search engines when you submit your website to search engines. For now, there are four major sites: Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com. They are responsible for the bigger part of the search engine traffic you can get because they also power other search engines, for example the search engine on AOL.com displays Google results while AltaVista uses Yahoo. So remember, concentrate on these 4 major search engines and forget about all other sites since most people all over the world choose one of these over any other.

Come back to read more about this topic later on…

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July 26, 2006 by Lee.

Have you ever wondered why certain websites show up first when you search for certain words in Search Engines (like Google, Yahoo, or MSN)? Most companies that want to be listed at the top user something they call Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are many theories out there on the best methods to achieve this goal. I am still in the process of learning more about this since it is a complicated issue. However, I did run across several SEO companies that guarantee that you will get a special search engine position if you let them do the work for you. Of course, they expect you to pay for their services.

“Actually, this is not possible. No company can guarantee search engine listings. If a company makes such promises, take a closer look at the small print. The catch is often that the company selects the search terms. You’ll be listed for obscure search terms that nobody searches for. If you have a unique company name or a unique product name, it’s relatively easy to get high search engine rankings for that term…”
– (IBP 9 Manual) Axandra - Voget Selbach Enterprises

So, don’t easily believe a company who promises you that they will “guarantee” that your website will be listed in the top 10. You must read everything carefully yourself.

To Be Continued…

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