I am active at various marketing discussion forums and one question which people often ask is how they should submit their sites to search engines. I often tell them that they are asking the wrong question. Instead, they should ask if submitting their site to a search engine is worth the effort.

Search engine submission is a huge industry because it is obscenely profitable for the service provider (usually using automatic tools or cheap labour) and lots of newbies fall for their offers because of the misconceptions they have regarding search engines.

But is it really worth the effort to submit your site to search engines? Let us take a look at 5 myths and realities associated with search engine submission.

Myth. It’s just so 1998.

That’s right, the need to use “submit-your-site” forms on the search engines is a concept which used to exist in the primitive age of search engines i.e. pre-Google era.

The best way to have your site found by a search engine is to get links to your site from pages which have already been indexed in search engines and not by using their ’submit your site form’.

Let me explain. The indexing and subsequent ranking [how search engines work] isn’t a one time affair. Search engines keep re-indexing the pages and re-ranking them to ensure that pages get the positioning they actually deserve and also make sure that site owners are not doing a bait-and-switch (by getting a good rank in the search engine and then switching to spamming tactics).

Whenever the search engine bots re-index a page, they also follow the links on that page to other sites and other pages of that site. If you have your link on that page then the search engine would visit it, index it and perhaps even rank it.

While submitting your site to search engines may not be a bad idea but it would not do you any good too. Why? Virtually all search engines now base their algorithms on off site factors like how many quality inbound links you have to your pages.

Getting indexed is not your objective but getting ranked is what is going matter for your bottom line. And, search engine submission is not going to do you any good on this front.

Reality.

There’s a difference between submitting your site to search engines and submitting to directories. The difference being that when you submit your site to search engines what you are actually doing is telling the search engine that okay this is my site, you are welcome to come and index it. If you feel my page is worth ranking for certain keywords then you may please.

However, when you submit your site to directories what you are doing is that you are submitting a title, a description, a link to your site and the category you want your site to be added in.

After your site has been listed in the directory, people can search the directory with keywords to find your site the same way as they would do in the search engine (with the difference being that search engines would match keywords to your site’s content and directories would match it to your site’s description in the directory) or they can browse all the sites listed in a category.

It is the second option of browsing all the sites listed in a category that makes submitting your sites to directories so lucrative.

The reason is that if people can see your site in the category then so can search engines which will consider this listing as an inbound link. That does help with your search engine ranking.

Myth.

Com’on this is no brainer. If it was that easy then wouldn’t everyone be doing it and be filthy rich by showing ads and selling to millions of visitors you would get from blasting your ad to those hundreds of thousands of sites?

The fact is that most good quality directories which can help you with your search engine ranking will require you to submit your site by hand by having an image verification to prevent automated submissions like these software / services do.

What these software will submit your site / ad to are those absolutely unknown classified, free-for-all link pages and other useless sites that will neither get you any traffic nor help you with your search engine ranking.

In the end, you will not only waste your time with these software / services but you will also lose the money which could have been better spent on pay-per-click search engines. Also, the promise of an avalanche of visitors will remain just that… a promise.

Myth.

Like I earlier said, most of the search engines do not care about most of your on-page optimization factors at all. What they care about is off-page factors like incoming links from authority sites.

Reason? Off-page factors are a lot more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

While some search engines are rumored to use meta tags for the description of your site in the search result descriptions but these tags are not going to affect your rank at all.

You may want to have them just for the sake of having them but if you don’t, forget about them.

Myth + Reality. Depends.

If you use automatic software to create pages stuffed with meaningless text full of the keywords that you are aiming to get high rank for, then it is a bad-bad-bad-bad idea. In fact, it is a sure shot way to get banned from a search engine.

However, if you are creating focused landing pages that are targeted at humans rather than search engine bots then it might be a good idea to promote them instead. Why? After all landing pages are meant to land people on.

Conclusion- It is a bad idea to pay for automatic search engine / directory submission software and services but it is a good idea to submit your site to directories. It is a bad idea to create pages stuffed with keywords and promoting them but it is a good idea to create landing pages for humans and promoting them instead.

And, if you want to know how to get a good ranking in search engines and how to do search engine optimization the right way, then it is an excellent idea to buy and read Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Aaron’s book has my personal recommendation and is worth every penny he charges for it. Plus, Aaron offers free lifetime updates to the eBook. Trust me, search engines change a lot and so do SEO tactics. This bonus alone is worth the price of eBook.