When someone asks me about search engine optimization or any of those "submit to 250,000 engines for $15" schemes, I usually reply that there are just a few search engines out there that they should really concentrate on and forget all the smaller ones because they are simply ineffective.

These search engines, according to my experience, are responsible for most of your site's traffic and should be a must to submit your new site to:

Google.com (beautiful results)
DMOZ.com (you get in there - you get into big ones like AOL or Netscape search engines, as well as thousands of alike-wannabes)
AltaVista.com - they have recently reengineered their whole search business that started to look better
AlltheWeb.com

I also think that its good to use a paid service offered by companies like Lycos or FastSearch that allows you to be included into tens of most traffic-busy search engines fast. If you don't care about time, then its absolutely best to spend a few months, because your site will get indexed by them eventually, if you do have at least some link-popularity level going on.


I find these engines totally useless:

Yahoo! - waste of money. I mean come on, $300 a year?
Excite - does it even search anymore?


If I'm forgetting any search engine, please remind me.

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Well I agree about the 250,000 submission schemes but I have to disagree with you on some of the worthwhile engines.

You left out Yahoo and MSN/Bing. (Not the Yahoo the paid directory, but the free search engine.) I believe they're still 2nd behind Google. Most of my traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and Bing and in that order. Do people even use Lycos, AlltheWeb and AltaVista anymore? I didn't think these sites were even around. Also, AOL and Netscape are both powered by Google with Netscape not even in the running.

I would estimate the top engines right now are...

1) Google
2) Yahoo
3) Bing (Formerly MSN)
4) Ask
5) AOL
6) A bunch of others that make up a very small percentage and not worth mentioning.

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Whoa. No offense muqtada123 but your information seems to be a bit outdated. Lycos, Alltheweb and AltaVista were big about 10 years ago but haven't held much ground in recent years. Google, Yahoo and Bing (as Lisa said) are going to give you most of your traffic. If you can rank well there then you will do OK in the rest. You have gone back to the days of Hotbot, Excite, Infoseek, AltaVista. Brings back memories of first surfing the web.

I just re-read your post. I CERTAINLY wouldn't suggest someone pay for Fastsearch. NO WAY!! Is that even still around????????