Webmaster Tips

Getting Listed in Search Engines Part 2: Submitting Your Site

If you've been on the internet for any amount of time, you've probably seen some spam offering to put your site on 500 search engines for only $150. Or 600 for $75. Or whatever.

The deal is, there aren't really all that many search engines that are worth submitting to.

And you can do it yourself with a relatively small time investment, for free. And who is the best person to say what your website is about? You, of course. You know it better than anyone else.

Search engine submission is a VERY important part of having a website. Our weblogs show that the majority of hits come from one of the major search engines or indexes. (You'll still want to get links from related sites, of course.)

How many search engines are there?

There are in fact about a dozen major english-language search engines that are of any value in generating hits for your site. There are also about 200 general and special-purpose indexes that are useful. The vast majority of the "search engines" the hype-artists will "promote" your site to are Free-For-All links pages that are at best worthless for generating site traffic, and at worst will get your email address on multiple spam lists. Not exactly what you had in mind, eh?

A search engine (ie: Altavista) is a database of webpages. You give them your URL, and they read your page, extract relevant information from it, and store it in their database. Many search engines also run "spiders" that roam around the net looking for new pages.

An index (ie: Yahoo) is a database of web SITES, not individual pages. Your listing in an index depends on what you tell them in your submission, NOT what is on your page.

How to get in them all, quickly

There are a number of site submission tools out there, and the best in my opinion is SelfPromotion.com. There are others out there, but I prefer SelfPromotion because:

• It's free. You are encouraged to contribute $25 to support the site, but it will submit your site to ALL the search engines and indices even if you don't pay anything. Most other submission sites give you some teasers, then charge you (more than $25) for the rest.
  
  
• It knows what different sites need from you. For example, some sites only let you have a 10 word description, while others allow 20 or more words. In such a case, you might be asked for two descriptions, so they can give each site what it wants.
  
  
• If you do support the site, you can go back and resubmit at any time with just a few keystrokes. You also get a bunch of other tools to play with.
  
  
• The author of the site gives you a TON of tips on how to set up your site and how to submit so you'll be seen. He includes specific tips to get that all-hallowed listing in Yahoo.
  
  
• He's realistic. For instance, on his site he expains that: "Registering your site will get you more hits, but it will take weeks or months for the increased traffic to become noticeable. After you register your site with a particular search engine or index, it can take anything from 5 seconds to 5 months for them to actually list you, if in fact they actually do. Registering at a particular index doesn't guarantee that you'll actually be listed; many indexes are very selective and only list a small percentage of the submissions they get. And the major search engines? Well, they're all taking months to add new listings. Furthermore, just because you are listed by a particular site doesn't mean that your listing will appear on any particular search. Even if you're selling something obscure, like, say, Polish Sausage, a search on AltaVista finds over 3500 webpages, only 10 of which get on the coveted "first page." So registration by itself isn't enough; you have to have web-pages that "rank highly" with the search engines. "

So, after you've gotten your site ready (see our last installment on Meta tags at http://www.greenbuilder.com/webmastertips/), be sure to stop by http://www.SelfPromotion.com. He provides a lot more details than I've given you here.

(by the way, I have no affiliation with SelfPromotion.com. I haven't even taken advantage of his offer to benefit from sending people to his site.)