- Search engines – these send their robots to crawl the Web and gather data. Years ago, there was a need to submit sites to search engines, but that need has not existed for years now. After a search engine’s robot has been to your site once, it will keep coming back periodically, hungry for new content. (The only way to stop all robots or a particular robot from crawling your site is to tell them to stop in something called a robots.txt file.)
But my point is that you do not need to pay someone to make search engine robots come to your site when it's new. (That's easily done, and I'll show you how.) Neither do you need to pay someone to make engine robots come back after changes to your content. If anyone tells you otherwise, RUN from them as fast as you can. And hold on to your wallet! - Directories – are compiled by each directory’s human editors from sites submitted to them. The main directories today are:
- The Open Directory Project (ODP), which is TOTALLY FREE (I’ll get to it in a minute).
- LookSmart, which is Pay Per Click (PPC).
- Yahoo! Directory, which costs $299 annually. (I can’t think of one reason to pay $299 a year for the rest of your site’s life to be in the Yahoo! Directory.)
Several large directories you can submit to are:
- GoGuides.Org
- JoeAnt
- Gimpsy
- IllumiRate
- BtoB (free or purchase)
- There are thousands of directories on the World Wide Web. Many of them serve niche markets, and their users are not looking for anything related to real estate. Do you want to pay someone to submit your site to SeaFoodSearch.com? Instead (if you want your site listed in directories), look for directories specific to the real estate industry and submit to the best.
Now here’s the PROBLEM and the purpose of this post: 
There are companies out there (and some of them may otherwise be reputable professionals) offering to submit and re-submit your site to a large number of search engines for a nominal annual fee. Usually the fee is around $50—an amount low enough to sound like a great deal, if you’re not up to speed on everything about search engines. And this fee is usually non-refundable. (I don't wonder why! Some even dare to charge $19.95 a month.)
Get enough people to purchase their low-priced service and the company has a nice little gold mine. If they get just 100 customers to fall for this, at $50 it adds $5,000 annually to the company’s bottom line. And 1,000 customers is a $50,000 recurring annual income.
Today, almost everybody knows it’s a good thing to have their site show up in search engine results. So, logically, paying a mere $50 annually to have your site submitted to 500 engines seems to make sense ... if Google is good, then 499 more search engines must be wonderful … a no-brainer, right?
Not! And here’s why…
This table at SearchEngineWatch.com shows search statistics for July 2007 by Neilsen//NetRatings. Study it closely. Do you see that 96.6% of all Internet searches are done by people using only TEN search engines? So, when you pay someone to submit your site to 500 engines, 490 of those comprise only a 3.4% share of all searches made.
Believe me, if you’re not indexed by those engines, you won’t miss them. And do you really want to pay someone to submit your site to Yahoo! Ireland & UK? What about Google France? Or Google Austraila? See what I mean?
“Okay, Kay, but what about Google, Yahoo, MSN and the others in the top ten list shown in the chart. Don’t I need someone to submit my site to those?”
No. And here’s why...
There is something called Dmoz. It’s found at www.dmoz.org. Dmoz is the name of the Open Directory Project (ODP), which is “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” That’s quoted from the Demoz site.
Now, here’s the good news for you (and this is from the Demoz site): “The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including AltaVista, A9, AOL, Ask, Clusty, Gagablast, Google, Lycos, MSN, WiseNut, Yahoo and hundreds of others.”
So, doesn’t it make sense that if all those engines get their listings from Demoz (plus from the data their robots gather from crawling sites on the Web), the directory you need to be in is Demoz? And by the way, Demoz doesn’t cost a cent and might take an hour of your time to submit your site. Now, there’s the no-brainer.
IMPORTANT: You do NOT have to understand Dmoz for it to help you. 
Just know that if you have a new Web site and you want it to get listed in the search engines your prospects are most likely to use, all you have to do is go to www.dmoz.org, choose the appropriate category for your site and click on “Suggest URL” at the top of the page.
In Part 2, I explain how to choose your category. Part 3 covers how to write your title and description.
Please click here to go to Part 2.
Writing for your success,
Kay Steele Faulk
The Real Estate Copywriter
Author of the forthcoming e-book
"A Copywriter's Guide for Real Estate Professionals -
How to Write & Lay Out Your Own Personal Brochure"
Available April 17, 2008
If you found the above information useful, you might also like my post that was an AR Gold-Star Winner:
What Is a Personal Brochure and Why Should You Care?
Copyright 2008 Kay Steele Faulk. All rights reserved.
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