Have you ever heard these common sales pitches? 

"We will submit your site to 5000 search engines!!!"

"We will guarantee a top ten search engine place for your site!!!" 

Now for the common sense! 

Should you pay for a service that will submit your site to 5000 search engines?

Certainly not! Why is this? 

Realistically, there are three types of behavior that lead to a visitor going to your site - a visitor can respond to an ad; he can casually encounter a link on another site that seems interesting; or he can be looking for something specific and find you in an index or search engine. 

A lengthy survey by site promotion guru Robert Woodhead showed that visitors who go to sites from search engines generally find their way from the top twenty search engines.

Yes, 5000 search engines do exist. They are scattered throughout the world and they service a variety of specialized subjects. For instance, if you are a health club located in South Florida, it would be of no benefit to you to be listed in a Japanese search engine (see http://www.goo.ne.jp/)  or a search engine such as http://sel.hypermart.net/ which is specifically for teachers and students of English as a foreign language! 

However, if you sell golfing products my mail-order to the US and Canada, you will benefit from http://www.golfersindex.com/ - a search engine specific to golfers and the following Canadian search engines:

AlcanSeek
WebCity Canada
Maple Square
Carrefour (Quebec)
SearchBC (British Columbia)
WebCanada
Yellow.ca (Yellow Pages)
CanadaOne's list of Canadian Indexes

To summarize, the services you might have seen that will submit your site to thousands of search engines will probably be a waste of money. As well as the top search engines, we locate the other indices which are relevant to your business, as in the golfing example above. This is what is known as targeted promotion – simply ensuring that your site can be found by people who are interested in YOUR services.

We recently had a client who, frankly, threw away $1500 to a service which promised him a top-ten position in the major search engines. Please note that the only people who can guarantee that you get a high search engine ranking are the search engines themselves! No outside agency can do this.

Some search engines will now take payment for good listings, or sell other useful services - AOL's 'Keyword' system, for instance. If you are interested in this service, please contact the search engines themselves, avoid middle men.

The only way a service can get you a high place in a search engine is by utilizing practices that are illegal at worst and could result in your site being banned from the search engines at best.  New systems are constantly being developed to cheat search engines into giving high rankings but they are quickly discovered by the search engines and outlawed. 

How much does it cost?

We charge for site promotion by the hour which means that you are in control of the cost of this service. For instance, you might decide that we start with a ten hour block or a six hour block; you might prefer us to perform monthly submissions only which would take approximately one hour or you might decide that it would better suit you to have monthly submission to all relevant search engines and indexes, plus the creation of further targeted links. 

Please contact us if you have any questions about your website promotion campaign.