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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
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Using side door / gateway pages to grab lots of
traffic
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Side Doors: How to make pages that get high rankings
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Search engine ranking software
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Why you should have lots of links
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Site Popularity: Writing descriptions that make
people click on your site
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How to keep up with search engine changes
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The inside scoop on paid top ten placement services
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How to be sure your web designer knows what he/she
is doing
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