Is it necessary to submit a website to Search Engines?

There are several notions about submitting a website to search engines. Some SEO experts argue that you need not and should not submit your site to search engines to get indexed. Their argument is that search engines love to discover new websites on their own, rather than sites being submitted to them.

On the other side, some SEO companies tell you that you need to submit your site to thousands of search engines in order to get indexed and will do it for a fee. They intimidate you that if you didn’t submit your site, it won’t get indexed and your website gets no traffic.

Who is telling the truth?

Both are telling half the truth.

The former (‘don’t submit your website’) breed has based their opinion on the fact that 90% of the search engine traffic comes from 6 - 7 major search engines. These major search engines are capable of crawling through the web on their own. They can follow links found on indexed pages and discover new web pages or sites. They had indexed billions of web pages already and are continuously searching for new and updated content. That’s the problem with them. They are so preoccupied with indexing the remaining content from existing websites, that they hate new sites being submitted to them directly. There is no time for indexing new sites as old sites are growing and generating billions of pages each day. Then, how a new site gets noticed? The answer is simple; you need to place a link to your new web site on a web page of an old indexed site. That’s what they say, don’t submit. Make them to follow your link from an old site, then the SE bot keeps an eye on your site.

But the truth is only some search engines are capable of crawling through the web indexing billions of pages. Not all of them.

This is where the other breed (‘we will submit your site to 100000s of search engines’) comes in. There are several, in fact a large number of search engines out there that needs to be told that your site exists. They are either poor cousins or lazy imitations of big search engines. Their traffic generation strength is far less. But they are also search engines. Who knows, tomorrow some of them could grow as big as their well known cousins. Some of them charge a listing fee to index your site. But they all need that you should submit your site to them so that they can index your site. There is no other way to get indexed by them.
Since their traffic generating potential is almost negligible, you may get very few visitors by submitting to all these small search engines. Since you don’t know how many of such search engines are out there, you can try a submission service for a reasonable price. But do not expect much traffic from them. Even if each of them can send 1 visitor per month, that could amount to a few hundred visitors a month.

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to all available search engines, big or small. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your site well optimized for search engines with necessary tags in place. You site should be professionally designed with god layout, graphics, navigation and the relevant content filled with targeted keywords. Don’t submit incomplete websites or sites with broken links. Prepare a site map and robots.txt files that tell search engines what to index on your site. Several small search engines require description of your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engines does not guarantee that your site would get immediately indexed with high ranking. Thousands of new websites come up every day and it may take sometime before your site is crawled for indexing or reviewed by human editors.

Major search engines offer you the facility to analyze your website’s position. You can get a lot of info about your website, if you subscribed to these free webmaster services offered by search engines.

Jaya Kumar Patchala, is a freelance web developer and SEO analyst. Website : www.hostingplans4all.com, email: jkpatchala@gmail.com