Submit-it or Not?

[Wesley]

Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone has had any experience of using Microsoft's BCentral submit-it application that they could share with me?

I need to submit both my partners and my website, www.babybabble.co.uk and www.propertyprospects.co.uk respectively, to as many, but mainly the more popular search engines.

Submit-it is supposed to review your site, checking for maximum optimisation and submit it, when ready to a vast number of search engines.

Does anyone have experience or knowledge of this product they can share with me?

Many thanks

[mtbot]

A former employee asked me the same question last year. I told her: "Submit-It is for stupid people." (No offense to anyone using Submit-It. It seems like a good service, but not a good return-on-investment IMHO.)

Though I have not used Submit-It, I manually submitted my site to hundreds of search engines. The only ones that I got results from were MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

In order to rank well, you are going to need to get links on other web sites. This is the most important factor for ranking well on the major search engines, and Submit-It does not do this. Also, links will also allow the spiders to find you much sooner.

Google, for example, will find you much faster by following a link to your site. However, submitting your site to Google manually would not hurt.

If you have money to burn, just save it for pay-per-click services such as Google Adwords or Overture PPC.

Let's review everything Submit-It does:

1. "Get a listing in our new Microsoft Small Business Directory." This new directory has a Google PR of zero! The best Microsoft directory is SurfPoint with a PR of 7. You can submit your site to it for free by joining bCentral.com's free Banner Network. (You don't have to actually use the banner exchange, just sign up for it.)

2. "Discover the exact keywords your customers use."
WordTracker.com, Overture, and Google Adwords offer this service for free to anyone.

3. "Improve your site with expert search engine optimization advice." The webmasters here at WebProWorld, WebMasterWorld.com, and other forums do this for free every day.

4. "Track your progress by monitoring your search engine rankings." Digitalpoint.com tracks your progress on Google for free.

5. "Check your link popularity and be alerted to broken links." Marketleap.com checks link popularity for free for Google, AlltheWeb, Altavista, and MSN while Submit-It does this only for MSN. To check for broken links for free, use
NetMechanic. It is free to use/sample and will "test your links, check your HTML code, rate your page load time, check your spelling, and more!"
http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm


Submit For Free:

MSN\Inktomi\Hotbot: http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm (This is the free version of Submit-It that Micro$oft does not want you to know about.)

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

[cbp]

Submitting never really works any way. None of the crawler based SE's (ie Google, Yahoo et al) will index you unless you have links to the site to find you, so you achieve nothing by submitting. They are crawler based SE's .... this means they crawl the web. You are better of spending the time finding links than submitting. I have not submitted a new site in > a year or so.

CBP

[Wesley]

Thanks for your comments so far, it's greatly appreciated. Please excuse my ignorance but what exactly do you mean by:

"None of the crawler based SE's (ie Google, Yahoo et al) will index you unless you have links to the site to find you,..."

and

"You are better of spending the time finding links than submitting..."

Kind Regards

[minstrel]

What cbp is saying, I believe, is that you can manually submit your site to search engines, or you can buy software to do it for you, or you can pay a company or service to do it for you - of these, the best option is to do it yourself manually,

On the other hand, submitting at all to search engines like Google, MSN Search, Yahoo!, isn't going to help much, if at all. First, it won't speed up the process of getting indexed. Second, if you don't have the content and the links from other websites pointing to your website, getting into the index is the least of your problems because once you're in you will rapidly fall to page 50 or 200 in the search engine listings without those links.

Thus, where you should be putting your efforts and your money is into obtaining links to your site, or if you wish paid listings, rather than submission schemes.

[Wesley]

Thanks minstrel!

So my main focus, correct me if I'm wrong, should be getting links on other website? Do they have to be relevant site? or would that help? Bearing in mind my partners website site is a baby goods/gifts site and mine is a discounted property (real estate) investment site.

What has been the most cost-effective and responsive method to your knowledge or experience? Or could you suggest how I should go about achieving the highest search engine positioning for these sites?


Kind Regards

[minstrel]

"Do they have to be relevant sites?" - from the point of view of search engine optimization, no, not at present at least. However, in my opinion, things I see Google saying and doing lately suggest to me that relevance is going to become increasingly important. I also believe that a good part of the reason for linking to other sites is to help your own visitors so relevance in outgoing links is essential in my opinion - and that would apply to any one who agrees to link to you as well.

On the other hand, having a link somewhere to a single "partner site" in a different area is unlikely to hurt either of you.

As for the best way to build links, go to the search engines, type in relevant keywords, visit the sites that come up, and for those you like and would be willing to link to yourself, send an email to the contact saying something like the following:

Dear ---

I have just visited your website. Congratulations on creating an appealing and informative site!

I have placed a link to your site at http://www.mysite.com/page.html. Would you be willing to reciprocate? If so, here is the suggested link information for my site:

Descriptive phrase for your site here

Thank you.

Now, I think it works better if you don't say that a reciprocal link is required but of course if you don't get a reciprocal link within some period of time I would imagine that most people would assume the link to them will be deleted...

[Christian_SEO]

I've used Submit-it at a past employer on about 30 client sites about 3 years ago, and it's worth about what you pay for it, in my opinion. The last time I looked at it they had made some changes, but only make it more difficult to use (as a professional).

Submit-it is very much like http://www.selfpromotion.com except more "friendly" and not as effective and with what I consider SEO information of lower quality(less accurate).

The important thing to remember is that your site needs to be optimized with what people are using to search with, and optimized in the correct way.

Once that is done, services like Submit-it are one option. Submit-it (SI) will do some analysis of your site and make suggestions. These are better than nothing, but learning more about this process is advised.

Once you are ready to submit, you enter information about your site and this is used to submit to the search engines. The submission process consists of select categories of systems or individual systems to submit to. Then when you hit a button, the site is submitted for you. The email address you provide will get a number of email messages that confirm the submission, ask for confirmation, and try to sell you products and additional services. Don't use your main email address, and this is true for however you submit, UNLESS it's really a site that you have an account with and want to take advantage of additional services like premium listings, banner advertising, etc.

That covers SI's main submission offering, but what about places like DMOZ that cannot(should not?) but submitted to with some kind of automated submission process?
Here SI provides some instruction and puts you in front of the submission page and may fill in some information for you, which speeds the process.

SI does track where you have submitted to which is useful, but you could do the same thing with a database or spreadsheet (hint-hint).

And SI does have some form of placement verification and it used to have periodic re-submission as well.

Speaking as a SEO, it's better than nothing, but there are much better options for those willing to spend some more effort.

If you do not optimize your site before using SI, it's going to be very ineffective...