Issue #016- Why Submitting is a Waste of Time and Ways to Drive Your SEO Nuts

Written by Scottie Claiborne © 2005

Don't Waste Your Budget

Submit your site to 1000 search engines! Build traffic to your site fast and easy- just $29.95 a month! Get millions of visitors a day!

If you've read these claims before and ever wondered what you might be missing by not submitting to thousands of engines daily, I'm here to tell you exactly what you are not missing: your money and lots of e-mail spam.

These services are completely worthless. And yet they are pushed and pushed hard by huge domain registrars, web hosts, web designers and many other credible web professionals, not to mention the spam mails you get for these services daily. Let's walk through the concept behind submitting so you can understand what I mean when I say they are a waste of time, money, and bandwidth.

1) There are not thousands of search engines. Who do you use to search? That's what most other people use as well. There are at most maybe 7 search engines with reasonably large indexes, and only 3 that anyone actually uses for searching in significant numbers.

2) Google, Yahoo, and MSN will find your site by crawling links from other sites. If you don't have at least 1 link from one other page already in the index, you won't rank well for anything, even if the submission does alert the engines that the page exists.

3) Submitting does not get your page in the index or updated any faster. If it makes you feel better to submit, then do it- it won't hurt anything. But automatically submitting monthly, weekly, or daily doesn't help.

4) Your e-mail spam will quadruple. I have tested this with unique emails and submission services- many "submission services" are merely fronts for email list marketers. You are actually paying them to sell your email address.

5) The "1000's of search engines" are often FFA pages on spam sites. (Free-for-All pages). You really don't want your site listed on these sites- it's highly doubtful it will drive useful traffic (if any) or improve your link popularity. They are often feeding grounds for email harvesting bots.

6) If your site is already in the major indexes, submitting it again doesn't help anything. Once your page is indexed, it really doesn't need to be indexed again unless you significantly change the content. Good internal linking should be enough to make sure new and updated pages are found and updated.

Submitting Services Prey on the Unknown

To many business owners with new sites, the claims of submission services sound like a reasonable answer to their web marketing needs. For much less than full SEO services, they get the "comfort" of knowing they are actively promoting their site. Many fall into the too-good-to-be-true trap, simply because they don't have time to do much research.

Often, they will gain some other links during this period that DO actually get them listed in the search engines and they start to see some traffic. Unwittingly, they attribute this "success" to their submitting service and happily continue to pay their $29 a month, while telling all their friends how well it's working for them. Thus the cycle continues and the submitting services continue to not only thrive, but replicate through the industry!

Don't Be Afraid to Turn Off the Submitting Service

I promise you, it's not helping you in the least. We recently had a poster at the High Rankings Forum who insisted he did nothing but page submissions and got great rankings. Further investigation showed that he had links to these pages from the rest of his already-indexed pages. How Often Should I Resubmit My Optimized Site?

*Note- this is a long thread and some erroneous info is given in the first few pages- if you read it, be sure to read all the way through to see the results.

Several of us created pages and even domains to test the submission theory. To date, none of the submitted pages that have no other links pointing to them are in the search engine indexes of the three major engines. Yahoo seemed to take the most notice, actually sending a spider to take a look at the pages submitted, but they didn't "stick".

Understand this:

SUBMITTING YOUR SITE TO CRAWLING SEARCH ENGINES DOES NOT DO ANYTHING.

Submitting your Site to Directories WILL Help

As said above, crawling search engines (with spiders that crawl the web) find and add sites based on following links. To get those links, you should submit your site to directories.

You must submit your site to the human-reviewed directories if you want to be included in them, and an automated program can't do that for you. It can't select the proper category, fill in the various different types of fields requested for each directory, or read and input the "ransom code" (the auto-generated letters and numbers you often have to input to verify that you are a human.)

Software submission programs won't find the niche directories in your industry or locality, and they can't pay the submission fee that a lot of the higher quality directories are charging these days.

When it comes to link-building, the majority of the process is still a manual one, requiring thought, strategy, and careful selection. So stop spending money on that bogus submission service and instead invest in some high-quality directory links or other industry advertising. The effect will be long-term and actually bring in more traffic and sales, not just more offers for low cost drugs, logo designs, and incredible mortgage rates!

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for Right Click Web Consulting and the facilitator of the Successful Sites Newsletter. She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High Rankings Forum.

How to Drive Your SEO Insane in Six Easy Steps

Written by Diane Aull © 2005

Okay, so you've hired a search engine optimizer (SEO) to help your site's rankings in the search engine results. If you're in a sadistic mood, here are a few things you can do to drive your SEO professional over the edge. Just be sure you sleep with one eye open if you decide to try any of these…

1. Go out and register a bunch of "keyword-rich" domain names. Duplicate the content from your main domain to each of these and link them all back to the main domain to "help" the main site's popularity. "Forget" to tell your SEO.

Not only will this not help, but it may prevent even your main domain from being displayed in some search engines. While the search engines don't actually penalize duplicate content, they will eventually filter out the duplicates - and they might just decide that your primary domain pages are the duplicates!

If you haven't yet done anything like this, but you're thinking it might be a good idea, save your money. Despite what some "experts" might have you believe, the benefit from a "keyword-rich" domain name is negligible, if it exists at all. You're much better off optimizing your actual site and getting genuine links from real web sites.

2. Hire a web designer who knows nothing about SEO to produce a site for you. Bring the SEO in at the end of the process, after the site is already completed. Forbid your SEO from making any changes to the on-page display of your site.

Virtually any existing site, no matter how search-friendly it is, will need some changes. If your site isn't search-friendly already, the changes may be significant indeed.

If your SEO tells you that you don't need to make any changes to your site and everything can be handled "behind the scenes," get yourself a new SEO! They're either clueless, or they're planning to use sneaky tactics that can eventually get you in trouble with the search engines (or both!). Solid, long-term results come from hard work, not trickery.

Of course, the best tactic is to bring your SEO and your designer together from the start, so your site will be search-friendly from the get-go.

3. Neglect to tell your SEO about previous attempts at optimization, particularly if they involved questionable practices. After all, there's no sense in dredging up ancient history.

If your previous SEO efforts managed to get your site penalized or banned, your present SEO needs to know this. There are things that can be done to try to rectify the situation, but those things won't be done if your SEO doesn't know they need doing.

Even if the tactics used haven't yet caused any actual penalties for you, it's important to let your new SEO know what went before, and what might still be lurking about in dark corners of the Web. This will help your new SEO get things cleaned up and avoid any unpleasant surprises on down the road.

4. Start calling your SEO approximately two days after they've first started work on your site, asking when you're going to see your rankings go up for your favorite key phrase. Call back at approximately two or three day intervals from then on out until you rank number one for your chosen phrase, or the SEO jumps off a bridge, whichever comes first.

There's not much to say about this. Optimization takes time to reach full effect. For instance, it may take up to a year before a new site will rank well on Google for competitive key phrases. Even for less competitive phrases, you could potentially be looking at a period of several months before your site's natural rankings settle in. In the meantime, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can get your site on the first page even for highly competitive terms, as long as you're willing to pay the cost per click.

5. Focus all your energies one a single phrase. No matter how much your SEO tries to convince you to diversify, or tells you this phrase isn't going to be all that useful to you, insist on single-minded concentration on this one phrase. After all, your competition's site ranks at number one for this phrase, and you have to beat them to get bragging rights.

Depending on its size, a well-optimized site can focus on dozens to hundreds of key phrases. There is simply no reason to limit yourself to one, or even a small handful of phrases. If your site doesn't have enough pages to support all the useful key phrases recommended by your SEO, consider adding additional pages of content rather than shortening the list of targeted phrases.

Follow your SEO's recommendations about which phrases should get priority. A good SEO will start any project by doing a detailed key phrase analysis to determine which words and phrases are most likely to be used by people who are searching for the kind of stuff you offer. There's no point in ranking highly for phrases that no one ever uses for an actual search.

Don't let your ego or vanity limit the potential of your site to rank well for multiple, valuable terms.

6. Check your rankings on a daily basis. Call your SEO to report (and, if needed, complain) about every fluctuation.

It's a fact of life: rankings vary on a daily basis - sometimes an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Checking your rankings daily, or, heaven forbid, even more often, is a waste of time.

Sure, number one rankings are cool for bragging rights, but rankings alone don't put food on the table.

The true measure of the success of an optimization campaign should not be rankings, or even traffic. It should be conversions - that is, how many people end up doing whatever it is you want your site visitors to do. (Buy your product, subscribe to your membership area, sign up for your newsletter, whatever.)

A good SEO will focus on this metric and will try to help you do the same. Well, there you have it. Six easy ways to drive any good SEO insane. Now, of course, if you'd rather have a profitable web site, you might want to consider not doing any of these things. The choice is yours.

Diane Aull of Nine Yards.com provides a full range of small business marketing services, with an emphasis on online marketing techniques. A raving chocoholic, Diane has been known to dream in HTML.

Wrap Up

Summer's Here!

As I write this, I have my 3-year-old wedged in the seat behind me, "doing my hair like a princess" and numerous small boys tearing through the house. They aren't all mine... they tend to migrate here from other places in the neighborhood.

The "lazy" days of summer are a lot more work, in my opinion!

Gaining Perspective

It's been harder and harder to motivate myself to get projects done- if you work at home, you probably know what I mean. Immersed in work and home 24/7, it gets easy to lose track of priorities and deadlines. And this time of year, projects in the yard are calling to me, as well as the constant chant of "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!"

I have found that getting out by myself for a while is an excellent way to sort things out and re-prioritize. Now, if you can swing a night at the beach by yourself, do it, but I'm just talking about an hour or two.

Knowing this newsletter was behind and I needed inspiration, I went to my favorite mexican place alone with a few of my favorite marketing advice books and some printed articles I had been wanting to read. An hour later, I had bean dip on my books but a renewed outlook for ways to attack several current projects. It made a huge difference in my motivation and perception of getting things done.

If you are blocked, try to schedule some quiet time (gasp) away from the computer! You may be amazed at how refreshing it is and how it can re-energize you to dig in to those projects that have you stymied.

See you next edition! -Scottie

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