“Are you going to submit our website to the search engines?” That’s a question we often get from clients. They tell us their old website firm would submit their website to 30+ search engines every quarter and charge them $150 or more to do it. Don’t waste your money!

While submitting your website to search engines may have had its place in the early days, the way search engines do business has changed and it is no longer effective. A much more effective way to get noticed by the search engines is the XML Sitemap. Here is what Google says about the XML Sitemap:

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

We use a plugin on all of our websites that automatically creates and updates an XML Sitemap and pings the 3 major search engines every time a change is made to the website. We also recommend that our clients go to GetListed.org to claim their businesses.

So our answer is, “No we don’t waste your money or our time submitting your site to search engines; we have a better way.”