SEO Traffic Tip - Search Engine Submission

Of course, one of the key things to being listed in the natural search engine rankings is to get your site listed and spidered by the search engines in the first place. Many search engines reference Google and Yahoo so getting listed by both of these first is critical.

Open a webmaster account with Google, verify your site ownership and submit a sitemap (preferably XML) - do not do any other submissions to Google and therefore, any free submission sites should be avoided if you are doing your own SEO and dealing with Google directly - Google will spider and list your site and your XML sitemap will tell Google how often it should revisit. If you have a commercial site, getting listed in the Yahoo directory is a paid for service but worth it.

But you should also submit your site to the other smaller search engines so that they know about your site and can list you. The frequency of resubmission will depend on how frequently your site is updated but generally, quarterly is about right for most sites (monthly if you update your site content frequently). There are two options:

1. Pay someone else to make these search engine submissions for you - Trellian's Priority Submission Service offers good value for money and is reliable.

2. Do it yourself by buying your own automated submission software. If you are serious about your SEO, this is a no-brainer. You choose which engines to submit to and how frequently to schedule the resubmits. You can submit just your homepage submit other pages of your site. You can also choose to submit to other classified listing sites. And if you have more than one site, the cost of your first submission will already put you in profit against paying for submissions. There are two tools we would recommend (both are great) - Traffic Seeker and Submit Wolf - both have free trials that enable you to try before you buy.

Realistically, if you are genuinely trying to get your website ranked higher by the search engines, buying your own search engine software for a one-off cost makes a lot of sense and if you are feeling really entrepreneurial, you can also offer a submission service to others once you have the software.


Simon Cooper is the owner of Top Traffic Sites, a resource site for website owners and bloggers looking to increase their web traffic.