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January 2002

Search Engine Tips
Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

In this issue we'll discuss submitting to search engines. First you must understand that there is a difference between search engines and directories. 

DIRECTORIES vs SEARCH ENGINES
Directories have real people who review your site to decide whether 1. the site is good enough to be in the directory, 2. where it belongs in the directory and 3. how it should be described when someone is searching for your topic. Search engines have electronic spiders that index your page. Humans working for search engines rarely see your pages unless you try to pull some dirty tricks and they decide to ban you. We will cover in a future issue the strategies you should use for directories because they are significantly different than the strategies you use for search engines.

Another big issue that you should understand is that many search facilities are pushing toward paid submissions rather than free. This is basically because their free submission model is causing them to go broke. In the past advertisers were throwing money at the large search engines to post banner ads and such. Now the advertisers are watching their money much more closely and the engines are hurting for revenue so they are coming to the website owners to help them get profitable.

This is good and bad. It's good in that much of the riff raff is not submitting as wildly as they were before which will reduce the glut of worthless pages the engines have to wade through to get good results for their searchers. The bad part is that it may cost you a few bucks to get your pages indexed in a reasonable amount of time. If you are a serious emarketer this should not dissuade you from forging ahead. There are still plenty of free submissions available as I'll describe below, but be prepared to make financial decisions when it comes to submission in the future and if you use the free submission areas of each search engine, be prepared to wait a LONG time to get your site indexed.

SUBMITTING TO SEARCH ENGINES
Some search engines allow you to submit every page of your website if you want to and some search engine only want top level pages. A top level page would be your home page or your site index.

A site index is a page to which all your other pages are linked. It's like an index in a book in that you can find all the places you want to go just by visiting this page. An example of a site index would be http://www.public-speaking.org/public-speaking-articles.htm This "site" is full of public speaking articles. This "site index page" has all the article subpages linked to it. Some index pages have every single page in the website linked to one page.

When you are submitting only the home page or site index the search engine's spider supposedly takes care of the searching all your links and indexing your subpages.

Also keep in mind that search engines are making deals with each other. In many cases they are sharing their indexes and directory listings. It's hard to keep up. I highly recommend the paid service at http://www.searchengine-news.com to keep up with the latest, most in-depth discussion of search engine happenings. Be advised, some of their stuff is very technical.

HOW TO SUBMIT
It is very simple to submit your home page or site index. All you do is copy your URL and paste it into the search engine's submission form. For instance if your home page was http://www.speak4money.com , you would simply copy the entire thing from the http to the end of the .com and paste it in the submission form. If you were submitting the site index page above you would submit from the http to the end of the .htm .

If you are submitting any page in your website like http://www.antion.com/teleseminars.htm it would be the same thing. Copy from the http to the end of the .htm or whatever the last thing in your URL is.

Some of the engines want you to submit your email address too. Just submit whatever info they want and be sure to look at the rest of the form. Some of the engines automatically sign you up for email announcements unless you "uncheck" the signup boxes.

Here is a breakdown of the major search engines and their  Submission areas:

Google (free) http://www.google.com/addurl.html Submit only your home page or site index.

Alta Vista (free) http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl Add up to five pages at a time with their crazy system designed to make it as hard as possible to submit lots of pages. You have to read code letters that are randomly generated in a really weird font so that no automated submission service can dump lots of pages into Alta Vista. You've got to physically visit the submit page to add pages.

Alta Vista (paid) http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/express_incl A page will get in fast and they have a bunch of other benefits. Pick your pages carefully cause it costs $39.00 for the first page and $29.00 for pages 2-10 and $19.00 for pages 11-500. PLUS you have to renew after six months or they delete your pages.

Direct Hit (free) http://directhit.com/util/addurl.html Direct Hit supplies results to many other partner search sites. Just submit your home page or index page.

Northern Light (free) http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html Just submit your home page or index page.

Lycos (free) http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html You can submit each individual page that you want indexed.

AlltheWeb (free) http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php Just submit your home page or index page.

Inktomi Web Search (free) http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp (free submission via Hot Bot) Inktomi also powers AOL, MSN and a host of other search facilities.

Inktomi Web Search (paid)  http://www.positiontech.com/ $39.00 for first URL and $25.00 each for URLs 2-1000. This is for 12 months.

Just submitting doesn't mean you will rank high
Submitting your pages to the search engines is only part of the process of getting ranked high when someone searches. You must learn to optimize your pages so they have a chance of getting ranked high on the keywords you have selected as being the most important for your products and services. 

No automated submissions
Don't waste your time or money on automated submission services or programs. You'll see ads all the time that read like this, "We'll submit your site to 3,027 search engines for $29.95." DON'T DO THIS!!!

What you'll get in return is 3,017 pieces of spam email from all the worthless search engines they submitted you to that only want to get your domain and email so they can endlessly spam you. The 10 or so search engines that you really want to get in will most likely dump the entire submission because they hated automated submitter companies.

 

For Search Engine Resources click here

Future topics for this section

  • How to beat Search directories like Yahoo

  • Using side door / gateway pages to grab lots of traffic

  • Side Doors: How to make pages that get high rankings

  • Search engine ranking software

  • Why you should have lots of links

  • Site Popularity: Writing descriptions that make people click on your site

  • How to keep up with search engine changes

  • The inside scoop on paid top ten placement services

  • How to be sure your web designer knows what he/she is doing

Back to January 2002 Index page

 



 

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