Search Marketing Consultant

I am surprised to see how many professional web design companies are still offering a search engine submission service which is completely unnecessary.  Beware of ads saying:

We will submit your web site to 1,000s of search engines – Only £29.95 per month

Or:

Get listed in the Major search engines.  We will submit your site every 2 weeks – Only £150 per year.

Anything like this is a complete waste of money!

Here’s Why:
There probably aren’t 1,000 search engines on the Internet and if there was you don’t need your web site to be in all of them.  The 5 major search engines have over 90% of search engine traffic so getting your web site listed in the top 5 is all you need.
You don’t need to submit your web site every 2 weeks, in fact you don’t need to submit your web site at all!  All search engines use a crawler, (or bot) software which scans the Internet for web sites.  All you need is a link from a web site that is already listed on the major search engines and the search engines will find and list your site. 

Please Note:  Getting your web site listed in the major search engines only requires one good link, getting your web site listed on the first page of the search engines usually takes a lot more.  So, submitting your web site to search engines is a waste of time, but submitting your web site to directories can be very helpful.