Many people have asked me how often they should submit their site to search engines, and in conjunction, which search engines should they submit to. I’ve done a little research and combined that with my own experiences to try and answer this question.
When I first started out, I submitted my site to Google and Yahoo, what most people consider the major search engines, every 3 or 4 weeks. I knew there were many other search engines out there, but I just wanted something that I could do quickly and easily and knew that most people used Google and Yahoo. I did this for about 3 or 4 months, which is how long it took for me to start showing up under some of the search terms I was using. Now remember, as I laid out in SEO First Steps – Finding Your Niche Keywords and Phrases, I had chosen very specific search terms, and I had my meta tags done but was really trying to maximize my content with these keywords. I did not expect that I would show up for general terms like “web design”.
After I started showing up I stopped submitting my site. I knew from checking my stats, (I use AWStats which comes with my hosting package) that the search engine crawlers, or spiders, where coming to my site even though I wasn’t submitting, so I thought this was pretty safe move. The only time I would submit my site after that was if I found that I slipped in the search engine rankings. I noticed also, that it seemed to help if I reviewed my content every 2 – 3 months, tweaked it and re-submitted. This however, was just sort of a gut feeling, but did seem to help me stay up in the search engines.
Now, showing up in the search engines, and getting onto the first couple of pages did not happen overnight. It took me a good year to get where I wanted to be, and I still have to be vigilant to stay there. But all in all, I would say I spend about 1 -2 hours a month on SEO, which isn’t really much considering that at least half of my inquiries now come from googel searches.
So, what did I find when I did some research. Basically, it just confirmed what I was already doing. It seemed to be the consensus that you only really needed to submit once, if at all, and then again only if you had major content changes. I did find that some people suggested submitting to more than just google and yahoo. Even though they make up the bulk of searches by internet users, you could be missing traffic by not paying attention to some of the smaller search engines. I have found though, that if I’m in google and yahoo, I do show up in most of the other search engines without submitting at all.
