The SEO Approach – Know Search Engines, Don’t Submit To Them!

MSN submit site page states: "Generally our web crawler, MSNBot, can find most pages on the Internet. However if your site does not appear on Live Search, you can send us the address... ”

Google on the submit site page also states: “We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web...We do not add all submitted URLs to our index.”

I know that the two giant search engines are not telling you not to submit your website to be indexed by their crawlers, but they are definitely telling you that it is going to take much more than submitting your website to be in the search results. Furthermore, investigating the two statements you can understand that submitting your web site to their crawlers might not make any difference!

I am not trying to stop you from submitting your website to MSN and Google, if you have it in your system and just want to do it, just do it! I still don't think that submitting to search engines hurts your website, but I definitely believe it will not benefit your website at all. It also takes a couple of minutes so why not just do it and get it over with? I'll tell you! The purpose of your website to be in any search engine's database is to be in the search results when your content keywords are searched for. Logically, if submitting to search engines does not lead you to the purpose in the first place, then it is with no doubt the wrong path! Not to mention that it would be a waste of time and maybe money!

MSN and Google are not the only two search engines out there! In fact, if you are a website owner or in the process of getting a website, you might already have received a solicitation to submit your website to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of search engines to increase traffic to your site. WORTHLESS!

Respected crawlers such as MSN, Google and Yahoo (the engines that send over 90% of website traffic) are now smart enough to find your website, even before you want them to crawl it! I have seen domain names appearing on Google results after starting to work on test pages of under-development web sites that are not decided to be in search engines yet (Note that this can easily and must be avoided!) .

Search engines are attracted to website content, they take this content and apply every technology available, every useful idea, and now even the behavior of your visitors towards your content to compare and rank your website. (Website Content has been mentioned more than two times in this article – because the purpose of this article is not to speak about content, you should note the term for further excessive research if you intend to be in search engine results!).

To succeed in your search engine optimization project you must do some work researching how search engines work, this procedure might at the end save you lots of time of working and then re-working. Search engines are software after all! This software takes the content on your website and analyzes it. Analysis is done differently on different search engines, and hence you see different results for the same keyword on different search engines. The keyword typed into the search box is the key that starts the whole process. After that the software behind the search engine tries to guess which website has the most appropriate result for the search term (the keyword/s). This guess does not come from vacuum, but from hints that your website offers to the search engines. These hints could be the website text content, image alts, title tags, description tags, keyword tags and more. As technology develops search engines are also becoming smarter.

In the near future search engines will be much smarter. They will be able to read text in images and videos, and I have no doubt that in the near future they will have the ability to read sound and translate it into searchable text.

The point here is to always keep track of how search engines work and how they develop, advance and evolve. Familiarity with this knowledge will help you optimize your website so you can see your website in search results.