Search Engine Submission
Part of our search engine optimisation services is submitting your site to the appropriate search engines and directories. But it is a small part of what we do.
"So, you guys add some metatags and submit the site to the search engines, huh?"
If you think this is all there is to it, then we have a great deal for you. Free! Just go to the Tools section of this website and click on all the links there. Read everything you can. Then you can do SEO, too. If you want to become a brain surgeon, auto mechanic or fiddle player, you can do research and become those things, as well. All you need for anything is time, study, and some practice and skill. It's not rocket science. But if it was, you could learn that, too.
We'll even give you some more free advice. The metatag was declared dead in September of 2000. There are very few instances where some are still used: the "refresh", the "description" (for some engines, not Google), the "language" tag, and a few others. What is not used anymore to any significant degree is the "keyword" tag.
Why? Because spammers started stuffing them full of junk and the search engines began to lose relevancy. The only major search engine that uses the keyword metatag now in any way is MSN, and it usually only looks at keywords that also appear in the visible content of the page.
In addition, most "submission services" and software do more harm than good.
This is a paraphrase of an actual conversation we had recently with one of our customers:
MNI: When your site is ready for the search engines to
come and visit - we will begin submissions and link building.
Customer: Great, I'll tell our secretary to get ready for the spam
MNI: Huh? We never spam. What do you mean?
Customer: Oh! Not you guys! It's just that every time my site gets
submitted we get spammed a couple days later.
MNI: What do you mean by "every time"?
Customer: Well, our web host submits our site every 3 months to about a
1000 major search engines, and we know when, because 3 days later we get about a
thousand spam emails.
MNI: There are only about a dozen real search engines on the net. And
they don't spam. The rest are called FFA's, and are spam collectors.
Customer: Really?
MNI: How many search engines do you and everyone you know use?
Customer: Well, Google and MSN, mostly - I see your point.
MNI: It gets worse. I just did a link backtrack on your site while we
were talking - you are only listed on 38 sites, and 2 of them are major
directories, with the rest in the other sites in your area that you traded links
with.
Customer: So where are the 1000 sites that are supposed to be linking to
me?
MNI: Busy spamming you, I imagine....
Customer: Those <expletive deleted> !
So, what does an SEO do?
There are many definitions on what an SEO does. Some SEOs believe that the only responsibility that they have to to drive traffic to your site. Others believe that an SEO does a lot more.
McAnerin Networks Inc believes that just driving traffic to your site is not an ethical approach to SEO. Why not? Well, here is a common scam:
Company Z tells you that they can guarantee you traffic on your
site. They even let you choose how much traffic. You can buy 5000, 10,000 or
50,000 visitors to your site! Wow! What they do is set up a special
"landing page" on your site that has a bunch of links to your main
site and they will guarantee tons of traffic. You can even check your own logs
and see. Better yet, the IP addresses of the logs prove they don't just have one
program repeatedly clicking on your site, but rather tons of different visitors
from all over the world!
Here's the catch: they have bought a whole bunch of pop-up and
pop-under ads on various disreputable sites. When the pop-up comes up, it loads
your page into it. This counts as a "visitor to your site". Of course,
they pop-up dozens of these all at once and the real visitor, who is visiting a
"free" site and therefore not looking to buy anything, especially your
product, is now busy trying to shut down all these windows as fast as they can.
They are unlikely to be thinking kind thoughts about your company at this time.
Not exactly "qualified traffic".
We believe that an SEO should do the following for their clients (at a minimum):
- Identify the customer base for the client
- Research the keywords that the customers actually use to search for the clients product or service
- Analyze the web server for proper log file handling, connection speed, security, and IP assignment
- Analyze the existing site for visitor usability issues and correct them
- Analyze the existing site for "spider traps" (designs that hamper search engines, like frames, cookies and Flash)
- Analyze the current competing sites for keyword density, back link amounts, and general competitiveness
- Rewrite current content to maximize both keyword density and visitor conversion
- Rewrite current coding where necessary to remove spider traps
- Identify whether a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign would be appropriate for the site. Often they are not necessary. Beware of the SEO who immediately "gets you to the top" by paying for it. You disappear as soon as you stop paying
- Hand submit the site to about a dozen search engines and perhaps a few dozen on-topic, high quality directories. There are NOT "500,000 search engines and directories" out there. Automatic programs that submit you to these are email collectors for spammers. Use of these programs can get you penalized on the "real" search engines. You want sites like DMOZ, Yahoo and Business.com, not low PR unknowns.
- Hand submit the site to as many high quality on-topic sites as possible, using reciprocal linking if necessary.
- Analyze the results of these submissions and resubmit (once) if necessary. Submitting monthly is a scam! It's a way to justify a monthly billing by the scammer. No search engine or directory requires you to submit routinely to stay "fresh".
- Follow up routinely and make sure that the competitors have not also recently hired an SEO, or that the search engines have changed their criteria (Google is infamous for changing the rules almost monthly) or that other problems have not appeared.
This is our minimum list. We also perform services such as getting sites "unbanned" from search engines, operating paid inclusion or PPC campaigns, ethical email and newsletter services and many other website promotion services.
