Search Engine Registration and Directory Submission

Most people with publically available email addresses will have received search engine optimization spam that begins like this:

"I visited consulting.gbdirect.co.uk and I noticed that you are not listed on some search engines ... "

The dots are followed by the spammer’s offer to register your site to up to 50,000 search engines, most of which will be utterly irrelevant to your area of business.

The "I" in this message is almost invariably a robot not a human being, i.e. a computer program which scans web pages for email addresses. Sadly, there are many search engine optimization ‘specialists’ who spout the same sort of tosh, and even more site owners, who believe that the number of search engines you register with has a direct bearing on the visibility of your website.

It simply doesn’t.

Only Badly Designed Sites Need Search Engine Submission

Search engines send out their own robots, which register every site that they find automatically. If they haven’t already found you, that fact should be read as a clear and unambiguous message: your site is so badly designed that even the most professional site locators can’t find it with the most sophisticated search software available. It has, in short, been made invisible by design.

Amazingly, many of the tactics employed by allegedly professional web site designers could hardly be better-crafted to produce exactly that kind of invisibility. We have lost count of the number of household name companies that are, to all intents and purposes, utterly invisible on the web. Although they have spent a prince's ransom on their graphically beautiful and visually ravishing pages, nobody can see a word of it unless they can guess the company's internet address. We can gently and tactfully point this out to your agency if you suffer from the problem.

If You Need To Register with a Search Engine — Do It Yourself

There is no secret to search engine registration and submission. Almost every search engine web site has a link to its registration page and every decent search engine allows basic submission free of charge.

The search engine registration page almost always has clear and simple instructions for how to complete their form, and it rarely takes more than a few seconds or minutes to complete.

Professional search engine optimization can help you automate the process if you need to register dozens or hundreds of pages on a regular basis, and advise you about the most popular generic search engines, but a truly web aware company should already know more than any search engine optimization specialist about the niche search engines for its industry/sector.

If you don’t, then you probably need our training division to bring your staff and management up to scratch on basic web research technique.

The Mere Number of Search Engines you Register With is Irrelevant

GBdirect manages sites that receive millions of monthly page impressions, but one search engine (Google) not only contributes more visitors than all of the other search engines and directories put together, it produces many times more visitors than all of the rest put together. Indeed, GBdirect’s own company site actually gets more visitors from Google than from the sum of all of 5,700 pages on which we are mentioned and the 2,884 pages which link to us directly.

These statistics may confirm the intuition that search engine registration is worthwhile, but they dramatically illustrate the purely logical deduction that some search engines are bound to be much more important than others.

Some Search Engines are More Important than Others

We have recognised a handful of generic search engines and directories which matter to any organisation which wants to be seen on the web. The other general-purpose indexes are simply unimportant.

If those search engines which we currently ignore are ever to be much use to their users, they will have to automatically index all of the already visible web sites on the net, including ours — so why should we bother doing their work for them?

Low Traffic Specialist Search Engines can be Vital

Specialist search engines and directories must, however, be treated quite differently from their generic cousins.

Companies operating within small, tightly defined, market segments may actually find that a few specialist directories can render them visible to almost every potential customer there is for their products or services.

Except for the unheard of case in which there is a monopoly directory supplier, GBdirect’s consultants can help you track down these specialists and help to optimise your position within their rankings.

Paid For Search Engine Registration Is Nearly Pointless

The cost of building and operating an Internet search engine is so low that any successful fee-based web directory or portal is likely to attract serious competitors who will offer the same service without the fee.

Since the fee-free site is likely to list both the fee-payers and the non-payers, it will almost always be more comprehensive and useful to it’s users, and hence more important to be registered on.

Consider Building Your Own Search Engine

The costs are so low that even small companies can build a comprehensive search engine for their industry (in which they are top ranking), for less than the cost of some search engine registration fees.

Unlike paid-for search engine registration this is can be a one-off cost, with no annual renewal fees.

This was one of the factors which drove GBdirect to develop TrainingPages. Not only did it fulfil our primary objective of increasing the visibility of our training offerings, as a spin-off benefit it has become profitable in terms of advertising sales in its own right.