Real Estate SEO Adviser

Real Estate Search Engine Submission: Don’t Bother!

Stop me when this sounds familiar:

“We specialize in real estate search engine submission. We will submit your real estate website to hundreds of search engines for only $199.”

About once a week, I get one of these spam emails claiming to offer real estate search engine submission services. Thankfully, I know enough about SEO to realize that website submission to search engines is not necessary. Thus, any “company” offering real estate search engine submission is a waste of both time and money.

What is a Search Engine Submission Service?

In a nutshell, these companies will submit your website to a variety of search engines. This amazing feat of technical prowess involves entering the web address into a form and clicking a “submit” button. (Here is Google’s submission page. You can see how highly complex a procedure it is.)

But wait … there’s more!

There are two things wrong with these so-called search engine submission services.

Revelation #1 - These spam emails usually brag that they will submit your real estate website to hundreds of search engines. Here is my question to you. Once you get beyond Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask (who, when combined, account for the vast majority of all search), do the other no-name search engines really matter? Not so much.

Revelation #2 - It’s not even necessary to submit your real estate website to search engines. If you follow good real estate SEO techniques — such as content development, link-building and networking — the search engines will find a new website in only a few days.

The search engine companies themselves claim that more than 90% of the website submissions they receive come from automated scripts designed by search engine marketers (in the futile hope of increasing a site’s ranking by bombarding the search engines). So how much attention do you think they pay to manual submissions these days? Not much!

Many in the SEO industry (including myself) agree that it’s better for search engine spiders to find a new website during their normal web-crawling process.

Conclusion
Don’t waste your money or your time with a company offering real estate search engine submission. Submit your real estate website to a few directories, or publish an article or press release online, and the search engines will find you in a week or less.