I must get about 10 emails a week from various companies telling me that for a nominal fee they can submit my URL for indexing to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing along with hundreds of other directories and search engines. What most website owners do not know when they get these emails, is that they can easily submit their URL to these Search Engines free of charge. Another thing is if 75% + of the search share is Google, 8%+ for Yahoo, and pretty much the same for Bing sitting at about 8% what else is there to submit to? Most of the smaller search engines get their search results from Google, Yahoo or Bing anyway.

Free URL Submission to Google

So I watched a video once where Matt Cutts was giving a lecture on proper setup of web pages to be indexed properly in Google. Matt Cutts himself gets these emails to submit his URL to Google for 29.99 or 99.99 for a bunch of other search engines.

A website URL submission is just a faster way to get you listed in Google as if you were to sit back and wait for Google to find it and index it on it’s own. By no means does this mean that immediately after your URL submission to Google you will start appearing at the top of search results, or that you will even be listed in Google at all let alone at the top. It takes some time before your website is approved for submission maybe a day or so, then you may see yourself if you were to type in www.YourDomain.com in the Google search bar depending on the competition for your name or a variation of it.

Free URL Submission to Yahoo VS. Paid Inclusion

So Yahoo has 2 different types of URL submission. The first being the free submission to the search engine waiting your turn to be indexed, or Paid Inclusion which you can pay to be included right away with maybe even some prime real estate on higher search engines results pages. Either way, its a big waste of money, you are only being promoted to less then 10% of the search market share at ridiculous prices. I am not saying that advertising in Yahoo is bad, just paying to have it grace the search engine with it’s presence. I never personally submit my websites to Yahoo or Bing, they just find it on their own usually before I even see myself on Google after I submitted to Google.

So take responsibility and don’t waste your money on something that takes less then a minute.

Submit URL to Google

Submit URL to Yahoo

Submit URL to Bing

Many friends ask me, what can I do to help with the optimization on my site, or their site. Since none of them are really technically savvy, I have them perform the off-page optimization, basically the stuff that doesn’t happen on the website.

Some off-page optimization can be:

• Link Building (with minimal reports/adds for a developer to do after)
• Website Promotion (getting the name out there, talk to people, emails)
• Directory Submissions
• Blogging
• Social Media Optimization (facebook, twitter)

The worst part about off-page optimization is that it all is dependent on the on-page optimization and page content being accurate enough to convey the correct message from the off-page optimization.

Off-page optimization can be done daily to improve search engine rankings. The process of link building should be a consistent process in order to build a habit of forming relative external links back to your site. Blogging can also increase visibility and diversity of the entire site allowing the spiders and crawlers to index the pages for various keywords. If you keep it informative and relative, you can come up with hundreds of keyword variations all supporting the content on the site, thus increasing your search engine visibility.

There is more things you could do for off-page optimization but if you came for the free tips, you obviously wanted to learn how you can do SEO without spending any money and these steps don’t cost you anything.

Did you know that search engines provide search results for other search engines and those search results contain directories, or databases of websites like superpages.com or thomasnet.com?  These databases or directories,  that is a site with drop downs or drill downs to the specific area that you service.  People do use these directories because they are human derived, meaning they  go through approval by an admin before they are put into the directory.  You do have to submit your site, it doesn’t just automatically appear in their search results.  Being listed in a directory for traffic is not an effective way to draw traffic.  Use this as an opportunity to build some sort of link trust within the search engine industry.  If that directory has 50,000 monthly visitors, that’s 50,000 visitors to the site, not your specific industry.  Say if 10%, 5000 visitors per month were potential site visitors  to your industry, where there are over 100 other sites competing for those potential visitors.  10% is a very hopeful number and realistically would be great but isn’t the truth.

Your best bet overall is to have your site in the major search engines and play the SEO game of trying to increase your site rankings for keywords you choose based on the content of your site.  Direct traffic from the major search engines may not wield the kind of conversion rates that the second tier or third tier search engines may have.  However these 2nd and 3rd tier search engines may not have the same amount of traffic that the may have either.  Use both of the options, but just don’t pay for higher position in the lesser engines.  This is just going to cause you to spend a lot of unnecessary money, save it for Google Adwords or Yahoo! PPC.