How many web design and hosting sites have you seen that offer “search engine submission” (usually to 1001 different search engines)? I took a quick look around and believe me there are thousands.

I’ll let you into a secret, actually it’s all a load of nonsense!

I’ll elaborate a little. First off the biggest player in the search engine game is… go on, guess… yes, that’s right, google. So, you would imagine most of these web design companies would submit you to this search engine, right? Well yes, but what people don’t know is it’s a free service, and you can just add your own site here.

The second thing I find irksome is the whole “1001 different search engines”. That’s like saying you’ll add someones business to 1001 different directories. I have two in my house, the Yellow Pages and Thomson Local. What people really need to focus on is search engine optimisation, not submission.

If a site is coded correctly, and is linked from other sites then largely the likes of google will spider (find!) it and the rankings will take care of themselves. I cannot emphasise that point enough,  the quality of the code and design, along with well thought out content has a direct effect on the ranking it is likely to get in the search engines. A poorly designed site could be submitted to every search engine on the planet and still nobody would find it.

So, if you want to get your site ranked with the big boys forget the easy way out,  take some time, some thought, and speak to the experts. It’s not rocket science exactly but it is a bit of a dark art that has to be learned. Plumbing isn’t exactly rocket science either, but would you attempt to plumb in a new bathroom if you didn’t know what you were doing?