Why You Should Stay Away from Search Engine Submission Companies
You’re an author looking to promote your book. You’ve just put your new blog or website up, but you’re not getting any traffic. You see an advertisement that suggests (ok, shouts) that you should sign up with a search engine submission company that will submit your site to all the search engines to make sure they “see” it. What should you do?
Run away. Run away fast.
These companies will take your money, and they don’t do anything you can’t do yourself. In fact, you don’t even need to submit your site to the search engines in order to be found.
All of the search engines have little bots that mosey around the web “spidering” sites and taking note of new content and indexing (or including) new sites in their database.
Yes, these bots can visit a site because someone has submitted it to the search engine, but they automatically go from site to site via links anyway.
In order to have your site found automatically, there’s only one thing you need to do:
Get at least one link from one other site that is indexed in the search engines.
Just about every site you know of is going to be indexed by the major search engines, but it’s easy to double check. For example, to see if the site is indexed in Google, type site:URL (i.e. site:www.thenameofthesite.com) into the search box. As long as you see the site listed on the results page, you’re in business.
You can use this same method to check and see if your site is already indexed.
Let’s assume it’s brand new, and you’re not in there yet. How do you get that first link to your site?
We’ll talk more about methods of getting free links later, but for now, just find a friend with a blog, website, myspace page, etc. Make sure your friend’s site is indexed via the method above, and then ask him or her to throw up a link to your new site. (Heck, ask everybody you know to throw up a link to your new site; you’re trying to promote your book after all.) If you have your own blog or another website that is indexed, you can add a new link to your book promotion site on your own.
Shortly, the search engine bots will find your new site, and automatically include it in their index. There’s no reason to pay anyone to submit your sites to search engines.
Now, whether or not you’ll get any visitors to your site is another matter. To learn how to get more traffic, watch for posts on keywords for authors, search engine optimization, and other web marketing tricks.
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