There are many webmasters out there who believe that there is no point in submitting your websites to search engines. They get crawled sooner or later anyways, so what's the point in submitting them? Then there are others who only submit their websites and blogs to Google. Let me tell you that both of these types of webmasters are idiots....now let me tell you why.Right now, I don't want to talk about why it is important to submit your website to search engines directly rather than wait for the bots to crawl it for you. Today, I would like to talk about submitting websites to other search engines besides Google. According to Hitwise, Google received over 70% of the searches in US while Yahoo and received 18.65% and MSN got only 5.36%.
*Click on the image to enlarge itAs you can see in the image above, Google has been dominating the market in July 08, June 08 and July 07. Basically, Google is the king of the search market for the time being and a lot of people believe that submitting websites to Yahoo and MSN is not worth it.
But lets not forget that Yahoo and MSN own around a quarter of the search market. Google may be the king but Yahoo and MSN still hold some value and can definitely be a good source for traffic to your website or blog.
Take a look at the traffic statistics for a celebrity blog over the last month (July 19 - August 18). I would use the stats from this blog but I don't have sufficient data available from Google Analytics yet.
The blog has received a total of 4,714 visitors from search engines only. From those visits, 4,254 came only from Google while the rest came from a collection of other search engines. Take a look at the detailed stats below:
As you can see, the blog got 90% traffic from Google, 6% from Yahoo and 4% from other search engines. Now you might be thinking that if most of the traffic comes from Google, then why should submitting to other search engines matter. The reason is that every traffic counts and even 320 visitors in a month is better than nothing. Overall the blog gets 460 visitors from other search engines which means that around 15 visitors come every day from those search engines. Now I am only talking about a mediocre blog. Consider big websites with lots of traffic. The number will be huge this time and they will matter a lot.
While it is good to submit to Google, submitting to other search engines does not take more than a couple of minutes and can guarantee some great long run benefits. In conclusion, I will say that each site needs traffic even if it is famous and all the other search engines can definitely increase the popularity of your website. Don't forget that Google is not the only search engine. And what if it disappears tomorrow? You always need to have a backup plan. Never put all your marbles in one bag!
Here are some search engine you can submit your websites/blogs to:
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Image Source
MSN search now gets results from Yahoo, so basically all you gotta do is submit to Google and Yahoo, which takes a matter of minutes.