Hello again, my social networking friend!

You may have been under the impression that submitting your website to hundreds of search engines could boost your organic traffic, and improve your rankings in the long run. Then again, you know that it would take hours to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, and anything other than manual submission is out of the question. When search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are dominating the search engine market because of their ability to automatically index new websites, you might wonder what the point of suggesting a url is anyways.

The biggest search engines of them all, Google, along with Yahoo and MSN are constantly searching the web for new websites and pages to index. LookLinkLove was actually indexed days after it’s creation because of links pointed towards it from popular websites. The common misconception of most people have is that suggesting a url will help get your site listed sooner. On the contrary though, suggesting a url just puts that website in a queue to be indexed behind thousands of other websites. That’s why sites like Google say that it make take up to 6 weeks for a site to be reviewed and indexed.

It’s easiest for you to just allow your site to be indexed naturally. If you were to link to a new site in your signature at a popular forum like Digitalpoint, then google’s spiders would follow the links back to your site and index it pronto. Basically, there is no need for you to suggest a url to your website, unless it was formerly blacklisted by google and the content has since changed.

Listed Downsides:

• Puts your site in the back of a six week queue
• Wastes your time
• A lot more complicated than just putting a link in your forum signatures
• Completely pointless?

Sorry for this short post, just consider it a quick tip sort of thing. Now you’re aware that submitting your site to search engines is probably one of the most pointless SEO tactics.

In a perfect world, only the websites people like would be at the top of the search engine results. In a perfect world, webmasters would focus only on building up their content so that people wanted to read it. In a perfect world, Search Engine Optimization Does. Not. Exist. Google is trying harder and harder to stop webmasters from gaming their websites to the top of the search engines. I’m assuming that they’ll never be able to completely end webmaster’s ability to purchase success.

A friend brought this to my attention when he told me that most webmaster’s were spammers. Buying, selling, and trading links are all against google’s wishes. Though Google is not the law of the internet, they’re plenty powerful to make it seem so. As far as I’m concerned, Google is right to deem the actions of certain webmasters’ wrong, or right.

Think about it, if the websites with the best content were at the top of all your search results, you and everyone else would get the information they really wanted. Unfortunately for your search for greater knowledge, depending on a webmaster’s ability to get people to link to him, he’s able to put any site he wants at the top of the search results. To me, it’s spam when you put a link on your site just because you were paid to.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have no problem profiting from people advertising on my website. Google does it with their contextual advertising company, Text-Link-Ads does it, Kontera does it, John Chow Does it, and so do many other websites. I feel so redundant right now I think I should end this post, but I’m ending it knowing you’ll see SEO in a new light. If you see the flaws of your old disgusting SEO habits, then repent, and try social networking. Since only the good stuff really gets popular, it’s not as spammy as Search Engine Optimization.

Subscription is something you would usually associate with a prescribed drug you’ve been taking. Either you or your insurance company has to pay for that drug. In other words, someone happens to be paying for something, and you don’t want people to think that your RSS feed is for sale. So whenever a non-savvy internet N0b comes to your site and sees the word subscribe they’ll think you’re trying to get them to pay for something. Depending on what kind of blog you run, you might want to change the text subscribe to something else.

Although it only takes a single intelligent thought to come up with this theory, I didn’t do it on my own. I realized the extent of the word subscribe’s negative effects after reading a post on CopyBlogger. You can find the statistics, (a 254% rise in subscribers) after changing the subscribe text to something else on their post. What you’ll find is a somewhat drawn-out post that tells you what you need to do to increase your subscribers, and a screen shot to back the information up.

My question is, do you really want or need subscribers that don’t even know what subscribe means? Sure any kind of reader can bring a boost to your traffic and is a potential ad clicker. Though, if that person doesn’t know what subscribe means, will they know how to use their newly found RSS feed? So, if that person doesn’t know how to use an RSS feed, how will the feed help you to bring that person back to your blog? Copyblogger doesn’t seem to see a good enough reason to switch their subscribe button to something new either.

So in the end it’s up to you, the webmaster. Do you want to change your subscribe button to say something like, “Get our Feed Sent to You!” for the people who don’t know what subscribe means, and probably don’t know how to use an RSS feed anyways. Or would you leave your subscribe button alone for the more tech-savvy internet browsers. Who knows, maybe the people that know what subscribe means will get their feelings hurt when they think you are downplaying their intelligence.

Maybe changing the button to say “Subscribe for Free” would do just fine. Or, maybe I’m just delving way to deep into this subject.