Listing New Web Sites With Search Engines

When I started my first web site I spent a lot of time trying to get listed with the search engines, probably several hundred hours.

After I was listed I spend several hundred more hours trying to get some page rank with Google.

Now I have maybe 15 sites with a page rank average of around 3, not a great success but it’s a start.

It has take over a year and I have learned a few things about search engines.  The main point I have learned is probably that getting listed is not that big of a deal.

If you’re going to have a successful site you need to get listed with the search engines.

It is about like saying if your going to be a tennis pro your probably going to buy a tennis ball some where along the way.  To play tennis you do need a tennis ball, but not everyone who buys a tennis ball turns pro the next day.  

That’s the same for web sites, getting listed with the search engines will probably do nothing for you for quite a while.

He is an example:  
Over a year ago I started 2 web sites. One didn’t get listed with Google for almost a year, the other got listed almost instantly.  
Not only did it get listed instantly but I got several thousand pages listed in the top 3 search engines.

I just checked my statistics and the site that was listed a year later that only has 30 or so pages listed with Google has 167 times the amount of traffic that the other site has.

So having several thousand pages listed for a year in the search engines has produced 167 times less traffic.

So if thousands of pages listed for a year produces next to no results how much time should you spend trying to get your site listed with the search engines.

Today if I was starting a site and someone asked me how much I would spend to get it listed I was say nothing.  I would not spend a dime.  If I could go to a web site and do something there for less than a minute then I would do that.  More than a minute and I probably would not.

So all the hours I spend trying to get listed and trying to get pagerank I would say were totally wasted.