Thousands of Search Engines - How Do I choose?
Some claims are made by some submission services that there are over 50,000 search engines to submit your website to. Whilst it is true that there are many hundreds of search engines, most of these would not be appropriate for your website. The vast majority of these search engines are special interest search engines or more exactly directories and link pages also known as FFA [Free For All].
Submitting to all search engines or directories is really a waste of your time and valuable resources and this ‘sling the mud at the wall’ mentality in the hope that some of it will stick is not a good idea. More importantly, submitting your website about fashion garments to search engines or directories about model cars in Venezuela is not likely to send you any traffic either.
There really is only a handful of search engines that can really drive traffic in volume to your website and, as always, it’s quality not quantity that’s more important. For this reason it is more important that you focus your submission to the leading search engines, as well as secondary and tertiary search engines that are relevant to your website content.
The most important search engines are currently the big three:
http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/search-engines.php
These 3 leading universal search engines make up for more than 85% of all searches and therefore constitute the vast majority of all searches made.
Other well known search engines such as www.aol.com currently use Google to display their results, so if you’re well up on Google you will be well up on AOL. This sharing of information is quite common, as to create, manage and develop a good search engine is a huge task and requires millions of dollars of resources to dedicate to ensure accurate and relevant results for the searchers. So, why try to reinvent the wheel when someone else has done it already?
Secondary search engines are important, as it is true to say that over 85% of searches are made via the top three, but it also means the competition for top placement is brutally competitive, and it is extremely hard for web sites to attain top placement for key words and phrases. Whereas, it is easier to attain higher placement in less popular search engines which collectively can produce a great deal of traffic to your website.
Secondary search engines, such as:
In addition to this there are country specific Search Engines, so, if you have a Chinese website for Chinese viewers, then you would definitely want to submit your site to the leading Chinese search engine www.baidu.com, or for a German website you would want to submit to www.fireball.de.
Directories
These are slightly different, in as much that all submissions are reviewed by a human person and, without doubt, the most important of these is the open project directory www.dmoz.org
DMOZ is the largest and most well established of all human edited directories in the world, which in fact supplies information to Google. So, if you can get indexed by the open project directory, it will certainly help your ranking and inclusion into the Google search engine.
The only problem with DMOZ is that the reviewers are swamped with submissions daily and it may take months or longer to even get a review. In many cases it depends upon your category, as if there are already thousands of websites included the reviewers may be less interested to add another, unless your website is particularly interesting or very different to spark any interest.
Older sites that are already indexed within the open project directory are indeed extremely fortunate, as new-comers will find it extremely difficult to gain entry to this already crowded directory. It does take professional help to determine how best to gain entry to DMOZ, and that’s where you should seek advice.
There are also product specific directories, so if your website is about cars then seek out those product specific directories that index automotive websites. If it’s about jewelry then look to submit to shopping, fashion and jewelry directories, etc., etc.
!If you need help on determining which search engines and which directories would be the most suitable for your website, then you should contact white hat to ask for advice. Click here
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