ONLY ALL SEARCH

hat's right - this search engine optimisation article is telling you not to submit your website to any search engines. Not Google, not Inktomi, not AltaVista. Sound a bit strange? Read on...

Submitting to all the search engines

Submitting your website to every search engine is an incredibly time-consuming process. There are hundreds and hundreds of them out there - no doubt, you've come across the companies who'll submit your website to 1000 search engines for you.

Search engine professionals know that the vast majority of these search engines have a very low usage rate and will drive hardly any traffic your way. In fact, it's only a handful of search engines that drive the majority of traffic from search engines to websites.

The major search engines

Some of the most important search engines, probably accounting for over 90% of the search engine market, are:

• Google⁴
• Yahoo!⁵ (read about Yahoo!'s new search engine⁶)
• Inktomi
• Teoma⁷
• Fast
• AltaVista⁸

Not heard of some of these search engines? Have a look at who powers who with this excellent search engine relationship chart ⁹.

Please note that the new MSN search engine will roll out at the end of 2004 and will be very important.

Don't submit to these search engines

“But there's only six of them - why on earth not!?” Well, aside from saving time and a bit of money (some require a submission fee), quite simply there's no need. Allow me to explain...

Search engines crawl the web every few weeks (or months) looking for websites to index. Here's how it works:

• Search engines start at one website with a large number of outbound links (usually a directory)
• They follow every link they come across, indexing each page they arrive at
• Once a page has been indexed they follow all the links from that page
• And so on until there are no more links to follow

Unless today is your very first day on the Internet, you might have heard that inbound links into a website are extremely important in establishing its search engine ranking. If a search engine can't find you by itself through crawling the web, then your website doesn't have any inbound links. If so, you'll never achieve a decent search engine ranking so what's the point in registering?