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by Jeff Lee
You've put together a dynamite web site and now you are ready to promote it. One of the most important ways to gain traffic is by getting listed on search engines. You have probably seen ads on the net for sites which will automatically submit your site to 100s of search engines. Is this a good idea? As with anything, there are benefits and drawbacks to auto submitting.
--Autosubmitting--
Benefits:
Autosubmitters are very quick. You do not have to manually submit your site to each of 100s search engines and web directories.
Because they submit to so many sites, they will likely submit to many directories that you would have never thought of.
Cons:
Many search engines do not accept auto submissions. One major site that will often ignore auto submissions is Yahoo.
You do not have the ability to optimize your submission for the specific search engine.
For example, an auto submitter may ask what category to place your submission in, but those category listings may not match ones found in all directories. If you run an internet service provider and you look over the auto-submission categories, the one that may best fit you might be simply "Internet." But a directory that your site is being submitted to, may have category which better matches your site, such as "Internet Service Providers."
Other things which may not be optimized are descriptions. Different search engines and directories allow for different length descriptions. Some may allow descriptions up to 20 words, while others up to 150 words. If an autosubmitter is submitting the same description to all sites, you will be forced to submit a short description to ensure that your submission is not rejected at some sites. This will be a lost opportunity for longer and better descriptions at sites which allow for them.
Only by manually submitting your site will you be able to optimize your submission.
Autosubmitters in general are not as reliable. For example, If you submit your site using an autosubmitter, and something happens during the submission process (the autosubmitter can't connect to the search engine server, or the submission URL has changed, or your URL is temporarily unavailable) then the autosubmitter may give up. Whereas, if you submitted manually, you would know that there was a problem and could try again later.
--Manual Submission--
Pros:
Very Accurate. You are the one doing the submitting, so you can make sure that all of the information is correct and that the search engine or directory has received your sumbission successfully.
Higer Quality. You can optimize category placement and description length to the search directory's guidelines.
Cons:
To manually submit to all sites would be very time consuming. If it takes 5-10 minutes to submit to each site, submitting to several hundred like an auto-submitter does would take about about 30 hours.
With these pros and cons in mind, is it a good idea to use an auto-submitter?
The best solution is probably a compromise. Submit manually to the most important search engines: Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, Infoseek, Webcrawler, Altavista, Google, Snap, AOL, and Northern Light. Most of your search engine traffic will come from these major sites, therefore you do not want to screw up your submission there. For the smaller sites, it's probably ok if you make a few mistakes. You probably wouldn't have submitted to them all anyway, so if you don't get listed on some of them because you used an autosubmitter, you haven't lost anything.
*Jeff Lee runs the Free Money Resource, http://go.to/earn-freemoney, devoted to listing and reviewing FREE money opportunities on the web. He also runs the Web Promotion Resource, http://go.to/promotion-resource bringing you tips, tricks and online resources for web promotion. This article is free to be republished as long as this bio is included.