Myth #9: You Need to Submit Your Website to Search Engines
A large number of SEO companies make note of the fact that part of their SEO strategy to improve your search engine rankings is to submit your website to X number of search engines. If this was 1997 and/or I was a across the ocean asking for your business, I’d tell you that this is definitely something to put on your SEO to-do list.
The thing is, Advanced Web Solutions is a SEO company in Kitchener who treats SEO as it should be in 2014. Travelling back in time doesn’t work when you want your local Kitchener-Waterloo business to succeed today.
When I see that a company will submit a website to 10, 15, 30 different search engines, I ask myself, “Who are these search engines?”. Honestly, outside of Google, Bing and possibly Yahoo!, can you name 3 others? 1 other?
In Canada (and all of the world except 6 countries), Google DOMINATES search. Check your analytics. How many users end up coming to your site from one of these search engines? I actually don’t know how accurate this list is. I see Alta Vista (who was Google before Google was Google!) is listed but as of this past fall ceased operations.
Why would you waste time submitting a website to Omgili when the chances of someone using it to find your products/services is so remote that you’d actually have a much better chance spending money on the Yellow Pages… and we all know how well they work in the year 2014!
That brings me to the question of, “do I need to submit my website to a search engine?”
If you have an existing URL/domain, definitely not.
If you have a new website, you could, but by doing so, you will probably not be prompting Google, or Bing, to crawl your site. Their algorithms are so complex and thorough that so long as there is one link out there that is linked to your website, Google will find your site FAR sooner than via their submission process. It has been proven that it takes months and month and months, if ever at all, for Google to work through a website submission request. Natural linking is what they want and as it turns out, is the best way to be ‘found’.
Google is very sophisticated and will find your site. The problem that can arise is that Google may index something that you may not want it to find. Having a proper, up-to-date Robot.txt file is the remedy to that.
Myth #1: Meta Tags are extremely important to your rankings
Myth #2: Search Engine Submission is the best way to let the search engines know who you are
Myth #3: Paid Search participation will help your Organic rankings
Myth #4: Ignore Google – Black Hat SEO works
Myth #5: More websites means more ways to entice prospective customers
Myth #6: I have a website so now people will find my business
Myth #7: My company name is 1st on Google so my site is optimized
Myth #8: My web designer Optimized my website so I’m good to go
Myth #9: Submitting to Multiple Search Engines Improves Visibility
Myth# 11: Your IT Department Can Handle Your SEO Requirements
