Dear Ken,

In this issue:

• Submitting Your Site to Search Engines -- the Good the Bad and the Ugly

No, there isn't a glitch in your calendar. Today is indeed a Tuesday, and yes, this is the debut issue of the new Web Marketing Today Free Edition, coming to you now twice a week as we promised.

We also assured you of some excitement... so here we go! As we officially enter our 12th continual year of publishing, we want to thank you for supporting us on this wild adventure. With this issue, we've randomly drawn 12 names from our subscriber database, and we are delighted to inform the following Web Marketing Today^® subscribers that they have been awarded a prize with our true thanks and truly without strings -- a free e-book copy of The E-Mail Marketing Handbook ($27 value) -- to 1. Andy Devine, 2. Naureen Vazeer Ali, 3. Werner Boersch, 4. Cris Matthews, 5. Gordon Hammerle, 6. Louis Chang, 7. Bob Lopez, 8. Mikael Roen, 9. Nilesh Badhe, 10. C. Hobbs, 11. Ben Brown, and 12. Leo Gosson. Congratulations! We'll be sending you the download code tomorrow via e-mail.

Stay tuned and look for more celebrating in our next issue, coming this Thursday.

Today I'm delighted to introduce Anne Kennedy of Portland, Maine, who is our Search Engine Optimization specialist. Anne is the managing partner of Beyond Ink, an advertising and public relations agency focused on search engine marketing. She is well known as a speaker at Search Engine Strategies Conferences all over the US. I've asked her to write about how to submit your site to the search engines -- and how not to.

Thanks for celebrating this 12th year with me.

God bless you,
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor

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Submitting Your Site to Search Engines -- the Good the Bad and the Ugly

http://www.wilsonweb.com/seo/kennedy-submissions.htm
by Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Is repeatedly submitting your site to all the major search engines a "best practice"? Absolutely not. Should you submit your site anywhere? Yes, to the Yahoo! Directory, the Open Directory project (aka DMOZ.com), and key vertical directories in your topic area. That's all you need. Launch your new site with good content, accessible webpage HTML coding, and links from highly credible sites. Google, MSN and Yahoo will find it.

Note: Submitting your site to the search engines has nothing to do with ranking. Resubmitting your site will not help your rankings in any way whatsoever. The engines frown on extra processing load; they're pretty busy already capturing all the world's information.

Good submissions

Submit your site to the Yahoo! Directory. It’s the best $299 per year you’ll ever spend if you are serious about SEO for your site. Sure, few people actually use it, but the Yahoo Directory remains a credible reference source for search engines when they evaluate sites, because those accepted have been evaluated by human editors. The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) is also good, but lately many categories lack editors and those still functioning are overwhelmed.

Bad submissions

Repeated submission to major search engines -- most likely done by something automated -- doesn’t work. The engines block auto submissions by requiring you to write in a code from a graphic that no machine can read. See http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl to see how this works. If you’re paying someone to do this for you, you’re giving your money away for nothing. Instead, do it yourself and give your coins to a group like World Vision to aid disaster victims.

Ugly Submissions

Did you ever read, "We’ll submit your site to 100+ or 1000+ search engines"? Don’t. There are nowhere near that man search engines and never have been. Most are likely to be links farms, long discredited by search engines and reputable search engine optimization firms. Participating in them is worse than worthless, since you could be penalized for being in a bad links neighborhood.