Search engines Only the big ones count

By David Callan
Posted Monday, September 20, 2004

Many of you have read with enthusiasm my article on search engine optimization and believe if you follow them guidelines and then submit to hundreds of search engines you will be flooded with visitors and prospects eager to buy your product.

That might be true, but you can bet your bottom dollar that only the big engines are generating any significant number of visitors for you. The truth is that you have just wasted your time submitting to hundreds of search engines, because only a small percentage (and I mean small) of them will send you any decent monthly traffic. They might claim to be visited lots of times but thats mostly other webmasters submitting their url and not actually using the search engine.

Infact there are currently hundreds of search engines out there, most of them are not much more than an advanced FFA page. There's only one way I would submit to these and that's with good automated submittal software, just to clarify that a bit more - I would use automated software for the less important sites, but I would always hand submit to the top 15 or so engines.

So once again beware of the ads such as 'submit to the top 500 search engines for only $99', because generally only the top 10 will drive traffic to your site. It dosen't take much time to manually submit to these top engines and your $99 could better be spent on overture.com or buying ads in ezines or whatever.

At the moment the top ten search sites - meaning both directories and search engines account for just over 93% of all search engine traffic. The other 6.something% is made up of hundreds of sites claiming to be search engines. Even at that the 11th - 15th biggest search engines make up most of that figure. So what are the search sites you need to concentrate on. The top 3 are directories as I believe their is a gradual shift to human-created search sites and many of the directories results are used be a large number of partner sites. And these sites seem to bring in the most traffic.

Yahoo.com
Dmoz.com (ODP)
Looksmart.com
Google.com
Alltheweb.com (Fast)
Inktomi (AOL, Hotbot, MSN + more)
Altavista.com
Lycos.com
Overture.com (GoTo.com) PAID INCLUSION
Directhit.com
Askjeeves.com

About the Author
Article by David Callan - admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of (http://www.akamarketing.com). Visit his site for free internet marketing articles, advice, ebooks, news and lots more.