DuncanM
Thu 29 December 2011, 05:21 am GMT +0100
I submit to as many as possible.
Yes, if your site has links to it, the search engines should find it. However, I consider search engine submission yet another part of traffic generation--part of an overall strategy. After all, if we all wanted to sit back and wait for search engines to send traffic to our sites, most of us would not bother doing directory submission, forum participation, social bookmarking, article writing, blogging, Facebook Fan Pages, etc. Sometimes people discover something good without even realizing such a site was available--without doing a search for anything in particular.
Here is a site with many country-specific search engines:
http://www.philb.com/countryse.htmI find that, after you have first submitted to the big sites (DMOZ, Google, Yahoo!/Bing), it is best to walk away and direct your energy on other activities. Waiting for a response from DMOZ or Google could take a long time, so don't wait around on them. However, if you submit to a country-specific search engine, you often get positive results faster. For example, if you are a Canadian webmaster, with a .ca website, and you submit to some of the Canadian search engines, the administrators of those sites might be more flexible about including your site. In turn, that improves the odds of getting listed in other search engines and other sites. So . . . you haven't sat around doing nothing while waiting for results from the Big Three.
In addition, there are many niche search engines (for example, search engines specifically for scholarly papers, scientific documents, blogs, teaching resources, etc.). Again, it is often easier and faster to get listed in a search engine if your site fits into that engine's theme nicely than it is to get into a site like, say, DMOZ.