Don't be a DIP - SEO You Don't Know

I read and participate in several email discussion lists. The following is an exchange I had with another list member that is relevant to SEO and a common misunderstanding with web site owners unfamiliar with best practices of search engine optimization. I'll leave his name out of this post as I haven't got his permission to use it. But the comments run like so:

I was advised that if I create multiple D.I.P.'s (Directory Information Pages) and submit them twice per month to all search engines that I could be assured of top 20 listings

Your first clue to bad information here is that you were advised to create D.I.P.'s, an acronym probably created by a company that has a large network of D.I.P.'s and makes their living promoting them. They think you are a DIP too - don't fall for it.

Second, there is no need to submit the pages to the search engines. Submissions have been entirely unnecessary for at least the past three years as search engine spiders regularly crawl and re-crawl sites. The more often you add new content (on a regular schedule) the more often the site is re-visited by the crawlers. If you do any type of article marketing, online press release distribution, or blogging - your site will be re-crawled on about the same schedule at which you routinely add that content to your site.

Your post to this list got you a link from the last issue, now posted in the archive and re-crawled often due to frequent updates and high popularity. Submissions are not necessary unless you've never gotten an external link, never add anything new to your site and never do any marketing or posting to discussion lists. Expect the search engines to revisit your site this week because you posted here.

I could be assured of top 20 listings in most of the top 15 search engines

There are four search engines that send 99 percent of referred visitors to your site. The following numbers are drawn from about a dozen client sites I have access to server traffic statistics for. Google - sending an average of 60 to 70 percent of search engine referred traffic, Yahoo - sending an average of 10 to 15 percent of search engine referred traffic, MSN - sending an average of 5 to 7 percent of search engine referred traffic and Ask - sending an average of less than 1 percent of all search engine referred traffic.

... and top 10 in the second and third tier search engines.

The above four engines are top tier engines, the rest (on any tier) are irrelevant to referral traffic. Is there any reason you can think of to pay even the slightest bit of attention to search engines that refer less than 1 percent of your traffic? Second and third tier engines could rank you #1 and send dribbles and drips of 2 or 3 visitors, sometimes, on a good day, if you are lucky, maybe.

Also that the higher the number of D.I.P.'s, the higher the ranking.

Yes, DIP ranking. Forget the DIP's.

This seems a little too good to be true to me.

There you go, you knew all along.