Tourism Internet Marketing U

Directories, Search Engines: Which Are More Important?

When it comes to ensuring that your web site is listed in directories and search engines, there is no doubt that search engines are more important. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily have to spend a great amount of time submitting your web site to them, making sure that you appear in the SERPs. The search engines have spiders, bots that crawl the links on the Web and index web pages that they find. They use the information on the web pages themselves to rank them for certain key words and phrases. While submitting your web site to the search engines may help them get crawled quicker, if you build your web site and ensure that you have links going in and out, you will definitely get crawled eventually.

But if you were to ask me whether it is more important to submit your web site to directories or submit it to search engines then that’s a different question. Directories don’t have spiders. They won’t crawl your web site and if you don’t submit to directories then you won’t get listed in them. Period.

In summary: It’s far more important to have your web site listed in the search engines than directories because most of your traffic will come from the search engines, but it’s more important to spend time on directory submissions than web site submissions because the search engines will crawl your site while directories will not.

Looking for more details on  spiders and search engines? Look no further than the new edition of my book, 101 Ways to Promote Your Tourism Business Web Site!

-Written by Susan Sweeney