Understanding Search Engine Optimization and Submission

Search Engine Submission 101
One of the best ways to get people to your website is to be found in search results of the top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL). The first step to achieving this is to announce to these search engines that your website exists. We call this “search engine submission.”

Search engine submission is the process of telling search engines that your site exists so they will visit the page and index it in their database of internet sites. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all offer free site submissions, though they don’t guarantee they will index your website. AOL is powered by Google, so if you’re in Google, you’re in AOL. There are numerous other directories and search engines, but most traffic comes from these major search engines.

Truthfully, search engine submission isn’t all that helpful anymore. The best way to get listed in search engines is to find a site that’s already listed and get them to link to your website. Submitting your site to each of the search engines’ free submission pages won’t hurt you, but in the long run, links from other websites help your rank a lot more.

Beware: There are numerous companies and software packages out there that claim they will submit your site to search engines monthly for a service fee. These sites are not doing you any good and can actually get your website kicked out of search engines for spamming them.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Simply submitting your site to search engines does not guarantee that it will appear for any particular term, so marketers try to improve the odds using “search engine optimization” (SEO). SEO refers to changing specific elements on your website so that it has a better chance of ranking higher for specific keywords based on the search engine’s algorithm. This ensures your pages are accessible to the search engine bots that crawl the web and index pages (explained below).

Keep in mind that search engines are owned by third party vendors, and while there are a number of things you can do to improve your odds of a high ranking in search results for specific terms, no one can guarantee a #1 position on a particular search engine. (Google says that specifically on their Webmaster Help Center page, so be wary of companies that claim otherwise.) The goal of most SEO campaigns is a top 10 listing for specific keywords.

SEO is not about sales. It’s not about closing the deal or generating leads or getting a return on your investment. It’s about getting visitors to your website through search engines. The odds are good that if you have a website, one day at least one search engine will find it and index it. By luck, you may even get a top ranking for a few search terms. SEO increases those odds by targeting a specific customer base through the use of keyword placement on search engines to promote specific pages of your site. SEO gives you a bit more control over which keywords you might be found under. After all, it means very little if you can be found under some obscure search term that no one ever searches for.

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