If you want free search engine traffic from the search engines then the first step is to get your website indexed by the search engines. As long as your site is not indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN, these search engines won’t even know that your site exists.
You will find many SEO Services on the internet that claim to getting your site indexed by hundreds of search engines on payment of $50-$100. Most of these SEO Services are just taking the webmaster for a ride; avoid them. Many SEO services online will charge you something like $50-$100 for getting your site indexed by hundreds of search engines. The truth is most of these services are not good. Don’t waste your money. You can get your site indexed for free by the three important search engines.
In my opinion, there are only three search engines on the internet; Google, Yahoo and MSN. The other so called search engines have so little traffic that you can ignore them. Focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google is the most important search engine. In fact, it is the search engine. If your website is not indexed by Google than forget about getting search engine traffic. Google gets more than 60% of the search engine traffic and its share of the global internet searches is on the rise. Ignore it at your peril!
Yahoo gets around 30% of the search traffic online. This is the second largest search engine. Getting indexed on Yahoo is also important for you. Yahoo can give you a lot of traffic for free.
MSN is the youngest search engine among the top three and is also called the Baby Search Engine. MSN share of the search engine traffic is less than 10%. Somehow MSN could not compete with Google and Yahoo in the online world and has been left behind. Most of the people who go on MSN, are not internet savvy, so you should expect very good conversions on it. Studies show that MSN converts 3 times better as compared to Google.
For getting your site indexed on Google. Open a Google Webmaster Tools account. Submit your site as well as its sitemap. Wait for a few days. Googlebot will come and crawl your site and get is indexed. It is as simple as that. People try to portray as if getting indexed by Google is difficult. But with Google Webmasters Tools, rest assured, Googlebot will index your site in a week.
Yahoo has its own Yahoo Explorer service. Open an account. Submit your site and its RSS feed. Yahoo takes a bit long in indexing a site. But once you have submitted your site, dont worry much. Your site will be in the Yahoo index in around a month’s time.
You can also get your site indexed on MSN by clicking on the Webmaster link on the bottom of each MSN search page. Submit your site. MSNbot will index your site in a few days. Just focus on these three major search engines. Rest of the search engines are not worth wasting your time.