Submitting
Your Site to Search Engines
Business
sites do everything possible to attract visitors (or potential customers).
Whatever be your site, a large number of new visitors are likely to come
from a search engine. Obviously, a search engine can direct traffic to
your site only when your site address or URL is registered in its database.
So, how do you make sure every search engine stores your URL in its database
?
There are
Thousands of Search Engines...
Yes,
indeed - there are thousands of search engines on countries, languages,
products, people, company etc. Fortunately, you need not really bother
about most of them in normal cases as about 50 top search engines is enough
to drive sizable traffic at your site. However, registering your site
is not really difficult (except a few sites like Yahoo!). Real challenge
is to ensure that your site tops in search result. We first discuss about
how to register and then the best practice.
How to Register
There
are really only two ways to register your pages. You can either head to
each search engine separately and register your page, or go to a registration
page that allows you to register your one page with many different search
engines a once.
Registering
At Individual Search Engines
In
directory type hierarchical sites (like Yahoo), you first find out the
right category or directory for your site in the hierarchy (e.g. Regional
Countries > India > Transportation > Shipping > Companies etc.). Once
at the right slot (or page) you feel you should be on, click the "submit"
icon at the top of the page. You are asked to enter your URL address,
a few other fine points, and that's that. You can apply your same page
to more than one category page. Yahoo! is perhaps the only search engine
where a human will visit the submitted page(s) and decide whether to admit
it into Yahoo! fold (only about 1% pages pass the selection test) If accepted,
you'll receive an e-mail to that effect.
Most search engines are databases that do not have a certain hierarchy
about them. It is just one huge group of pages. AltaVista, Infoseek, Webcrawler
etc. are some examples. These are fairly simple to register with. Usually
on the main page of the search engine there is an icon that says something
like "submit URL." Click on it and answer pretty much the same question
you'll answer anywhere else and, again, that's that. Sometimes, you won't
have to answer any question except your URL and e-mail address. The search
engine will send a robot (a computer program) to submitted page(s) to
extract relevant data, analyze it using its own method and store the data
with appropriate relevance value. Rank of your site in a search result
will depend upon this relevance value. In actual practice, unless your
site ranks among top 15-20 in a search result - you are unlikely to gain
any benefit from the search. We shall discuss search engine ranking separately.
Registering
Many Pages At Once
There
are sites that submit your page to multiple search engines for a fee,
there are still others who do it free. There are also software programs
(basically robot) that does site submission to thousands of sites
Let's take look at what a relatively well known submission service like
Submit-It does.
Submit-It has two levels: a free and a pay level. The free level is pretty
good. You'll get 10 or so search engines for that. How long it will be
free I don't know, so I'd hop to it. When you get to Submit-It you will
be asked the few questions and then go to another page with a whole lot
of buttons. Each button sends your information to a different search engine.
There you'll probably answer a few more questions. The whole process to
register one page takes about 20 minutes.
Go ahead and register a page just for the heck of it. Let one of the engines
walk you through the process. You'll find that the number of visitors
to your site goes up a bit, if not a lot.
Search
Engine Submission Sites
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