We all want to find that perfect product or service where we enter our domain name, press a button and traffic magically begins to appear. We’ve all seen the ads, “Submit your site to the top 25,000 search engines every month for only $29.95." or something like that. Right? Truth is the majority of those search engines aren’t search engines at all but websites set up for the sole purpose of collecting your email address so they can send you junk mail. They’re simply scripts designed to gather this information from unsuspecting search engine marketers.

These services stay in business because people are attracted to the promise of a single-click, silver bullet solution. Only a relative handful of search engines command enough traffic to be worth promoting to and submissions today can easily be done by hand.

Most importantly, search engines and web directories generally don't look kindly upon automated submissions, and will often ignore them or even drop your site from its listings.

DO:

Bear in mind, there aren't that many search engines in existence and someone looking for your product is not likely to go looking for it on some obscure list of links somewhere. So just don’t buy into the hype. Bulk and automated submissions don’t work.

And any company that offers to submit your site to hundreds of search engines and directories for a handful of dollars must be using a program to do it. So JUST SAY NO.

As the number of scam sites has increased, more and more directories are cracking down on automatic submissions and while the software companies will fall over themselves NOT to tell you this, the use of submission software may in some cases guarantee your exclusion from certain directories, and/or get you blacklisted altogether.

There are only about 8-10 top search engines worth bothering about. And a handful of directories. So submit your site to a search engine after you ensure it's not already in the index, then submit your home page only once and do it manually. Focus on the big 8 to 10 and follow their submission guidelines for submitting your site.

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