Chances are, at some point or another, you’ve received an email from a search engine optimization (SEO) firm that promises to submit your website to thousands of search engines or hundreds of directories promising higher rankings, more visitors, more clicks.

If you fall for this ploy, you’ll find yourself out hundreds of dollars with no real value in return.

The truth is that there are only three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Any other site that calls itself a search engine simply returns results from one of the big three, so submitting your company website to any of these other so called “search engines” is a waste of your valuable time.

When to Submit Your Website to Google, Yahoo or Bing

You may want to submit your website to the major search engines if it is brand new, and you want your website to be included in search results as soon as possible. Honestly, this is really not necessary – and many argue that it won’t speed up the process.

The major search engines do a pretty good job of finding new content fairly quickly, and your website will soon be listed in a few days – even if you never officially submit your site to a search engine.

Search engines use programs called robots or spiders to crawl the internet looking for new content. These spiders follow links from one web page to another, and from one website to another, with complex algorithms.  When the spider encounters new content, a new page, new photograph, or a new site, it indexes the information immediately.

In other words, it records the new content and its location so when someone does a search including keywords or phrases that matches the content on that particular web page or site, that specific URL address, title and description will appear in the search results.

And your site will appear on Google, Bing, and Yahoo whether you officially submit it or not, so please – please! – don’t waste valuable time, effort, or dollars succumbing to scrupulous ploys and promises of what you can already get for free.