Do I Need a Search Engine Submission Tool? How Get in Google & Bing for Free

Posted March 10, 2011 by Team UpCity | 2 comments

This post is meant to be helpful for those new to SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and looking to learn more about fundamental best practices that will help your Website generate more qualified traffic from search engines. You can also find DIYSEO posts classified by level of expertise on the following pages:

• Posts for any SEO experience level
• Posts for beginner level SEO (those new to SEO)
• Posts for those with an intermediate level of SEO understanding
• Posts for those with an advanced level of SEO understanding

You’ve built a great site. The next step is getting your site to show up on the search engines. So, what is the best way to do that? Do you need to submit your site manually to each of the major  search engines, Google, Yahoo, and Bing? Or, should you select a search engine submission tool that will do them all at once for you?

The good news is, none of these is really necessary.

All the major search engines have advanced to the point where they’ll find you on their own if you’re leveraging SEO best practices.

Don’t waste money on a search engine submission tool, and don’t waste your time submitting to search engines manually.

What you can do, however, is get started with SEO best practices to help the search engines find your site. As part of a successful search engine marketing campaign, you can, and should, be doing whatever you can to make sure that there are relevant and quality links from other Websites linking to your site.

A great way to get this process moving is by submitting to high quality website directories (submitting your site to relevant, high quality directories is different than submitting to search engines and is also different than buying links, as we pointed out recently here on the blog). These directories are trusted sources of links and are “checked” (or crawled) by search engines frequently, so a link from places like Yahoo, Best of the Web, or other quality directories will help your site to be noticed by search engines quickly, and will help you to actually rank for your target keywords.

This is another important thing to note about search engine submission: submitting to a search engine doesn’t help you to actually start to rank for your target terms and drive traffic. If you submit to a search engine but don’t have any backlinks, you’re not likely to show up when people search for terms related to your business anyway, so it’s better to get to work building links.

Is Submitting a Site Map the Same as Submitting to a Search Engine?

One final note worth mentioning is that submitting a site map to Google or the other search engines is different from what’s often referred to as “site submission”. A site map is a tool to help Google or the other search engines better understand your site. Sometimes for larger sites XML site maps can be useful in helping the search engines find all of your pages and understand how your site is laid out, but for many small business sites that are only 5-10 pages simply leveraging tactics like those recommended in DIYSEO[now UpCity]’s customized action plan in optimizing for search engines will ensure that Google finds all of your pages.

Categories: SEO Questions