Even for people that are brand new to the internet, it is not hard to see that the search engines hold the key to getting massive exposure for any website that is able to rank for a highly searched key phrase. For individuals and small businesses that are trying to run websites as an extension of their business operations, getting some attention from these search services can make their difference between a website being highly profitable, and being an utter waste of time to build. Still, many people face confusion when it comes to trying to get that attention, particularly when it comes to getting a website indexed with these sites in the first place.
Once upon a time, it was the case that if you owned a website, the only way it was going to get any traffic is if you manually submitted your web address, a site map, and a plethora of other information to the search engine's submission service. You had to fill out forms, and you had to do it for every single search service you wanted to appear in. If you didn't, it might take months for them to pick up on the fact that your website exists "naturally."
In terms of the passage of time on the internet, those days were an eternity ago. Web search services have always had an interest in developing as comprehensive of a database as possible, so it's only logical that the technology they use to seek out new content on the web would become more advanced with time. These days, the automatic "spider" bots that crawl the web are fast, powerful, and extremely smart.
This age of smarter search software means that search engine submission is not only unnecessary, but a complete waste of time. In the days of modern internet marketing, the most effective way to get noticed by the search engines is to build back links from other domains that already have the respect of the engines.
These back links act as roadways for the search software bots to follow straight to your site, and one of the most effective ways to build high quality back links quickly is to perform directory submissions. Submitting useful information about your business in the form of an article or a press release not only grants you back links from the directory itself, but from other webmasters that may pick up your content, giving it just that much more strength. In time, you can have more web traffic from directory submissions than you know what to do with.
Shyam T Unni (a.k.a Tuning) is the Managing Partner of Tuning Digital, the company behind the famous Directory Submission service. This article was originally posted at: Are Search Engine Submissions Worthwhile?
Search Engine Submissions: Is It Worthwhile?