Many
of you have read with enthusiasm my article on search engine optimization
and believe if you follow them guidelines and then submit to hundreds
of search engines you will be flooded with visitors and prospects
eager to buy your product.
That
might be true, but you can bet your bottom dollar that only the
big engines are generating any significant number of visitors
for you. The truth is that you have just wasted your time submitting
to hundreds of search engines, because only a small percentage
(and I mean small) of them will send you any decent monthly traffic.
They might claim to be visited lots of times but thats mostly
other webmasters submitting their url and not actually using the
search engine.
Infact
there are currently hundreds of search engines out there, most
of them are not much more than an advanced FFA page.
There's only one way I would submit to these and that's with good
automated submittal software, just to clarify that a bit more
- I would use automated software for the less important sites,
but I would always hand submit to the top 15 or so engines.
So
once again beware of the ads such as 'submit to the top
500 search engines for only $99', because generally only
the top 10 will drive traffic to your site. It dosen't take much
time to manually submit to these top engines and your $99 could
better be spent on overture.com or buying ads in ezines or whatever.
At
the moment the top ten search sites - meaning both directories
and search engines account for just over 93% of all search engine
traffic. The other 6.something% is made up of hundreds of sites
claiming to be search engines. Even at that the 11th - 15th biggest
search engines make up most of that figure. So what are the search
sites you need to concentrate on. The top 3 are directories as
I believe their is a gradual shift to human-created search sites
and many of the directories results are used be a large number
of partner sites. And these sites seem to bring in the most traffic.
Yahoo.com
Dmoz.com (ODP)
Looksmart.com
Google.com
Alltheweb.com (Fast)
Inktomi (AOL, Hotbot, MSN + more)
Altavista.com
Lycos.com
Overture.com (GoTo.com) PAID INCLUSION
Directhit.com
Askjeeves.com
Article by David Callan - admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for free internet marketing articles, advice, ebooks,
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