Do I need to submit Website Details to Search Engines?

No, Create XML Sitemap and Submit to Google, Yahoo! and MSN

A very common sales speech, “Submit your site to 200 Search Engines and improve your search engine optimization … blah blah blah”. I always wonder who cares about this 200 Search Engines when whole world is satisfied with just 5 search engines; Google, Yahoo!, Live, Ask and AOL.

According to comScore’s recent report on Search Engine Market share, Google is still leading sharing 61.5% despite of dropping from 61.8%. It’s their first drop in market share since December 2007 (when it went from 58.6% to 58.4%). In contrast, Microsoft showed its first gain in the past year. After months and months of incremental decline, Microsoft rose from an 8.5% share in May 2008 to 9.2% in June 2008. That’s the first full month that Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback has been running, so this is likely a factor in Microsoft’s rise.

Before Microsoft and Yahoo feel too good about Google’s “fall,” let’s consider the actual number of searches each handled versus market share?

• Google: 7.1 billion
• Yahoo: 2.4 billion
• Microsoft: 1.1 billion
• Ask: 501 million
• AOL: 471 million

I’ve been drawing all these stats just to proof that speending money after submitting websites to search engines (I’m not talking about directory submission) is just waste of money. Personally I don’t care about any search engines, except Google, Yahoo! and MSN. So how to get maximum search traffic from these Search Engines and getting indexed quickly?

Beside performing different SEO methods, I always make sure that most recent Sitemap is submitted to all of these Search Engines. Sitemaps are of different formats, but XML sitemaps are the most popular form and can be very easily created by both online and offline tools available free over internet. XML Sitemaps is the best online sitemap creating tool, but this free tool allows you to create up to 500 links. However, I personally use Vigos gSitemap, it can be downloaded free, can create unlimited links and upload to website. But there is a good news for Wordpress lovers, enabling Google XML Sitemaps plugins ensures sitemap is always modified as soon as content is added to websites or blog.

Now lets talk how to submit sitemaps to these search engines? Some people use Google Site Submit and Live Search URL Submission. But I hardly ever visited these urls. Rather create my sitemaps, upload, I create accounts with Google Webmasters Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Live Webmaster and submit Sitemap link to these webmasters tools.

So What’re the benefits?

Main benefit is that, you don’t need to wait for the SE bots to find your modified pages and index them. Submitting sitemaps ensure that bot can have all the links at a time and can crawl according to the links. Moreover, if any page is away from homepage by 3 links deep, bots hardly visit those pages, sitemaps helps to index deepest pages very easily. But I’ll recommend not to create any page 3 links deep. That’s not a good idea for SEO!

Source:

• comScore: Yahoo & Microsoft Gain Share But Google Breaks 7 Billion Searches
• comScore Releases June 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings