How many sales pitches have you seen that mention this: "We'll submit your website to THOUSANDS of search engines all over the internet to get every possible exposure for only $999." Umm, not necessary!! There are services that will submit your site to multiple search engines for a fee. You don't need them! You will probably get better results doing it yourself and it's free. Submitting your site to the search engines is a smart move even if your marketing is done offline. It's easy and it can bring additional traffic. Listed below are the engines that account for over 95% of all web search traffic. Getting the engine to scan your site and list it is easy.
Google: Google maintains the largest searchable index of the World Wide Web.
Submission page: http://www.google.com/addurl.html Home page: http://www.google.com/
Tips:
- Google wants only your top-level URL; it'll spider your site from there. - Users can view a cached copy of your pages through Google's archive. - If other pages in Google's index point to your Web site, your rank in Google search results may rise.
Yahoo: Yahoo is the senior Web directory, established in April 1994 as Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Submission page: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ Home page: http://www.yahoo.com/
Tips:
- Find the Yahoo category best suited to your site before registering. This is part of market research. VERY IMPORTANT. - Is your site commercial, specific to a geographic region, or your own home page? With this knowledge, you make the best suggestion.
Open Directory Project: Newhoo was the original name of The Open Directory Project (ODP).com in 1998. ODP is among the largest and most frequently updated online directories. AOL and other major portals use ODP content to power their own Web directories.
Submission page: http://dmoz.org/add.html Home page: http://www.dmoz.org/
Tips:
- Links are added and organized by volunteer experts called editors. The editors make sure that links adhere to the policies outlined on the ODP submission page. - You have to find the Open Directory category best suited to your site before asking an editor to include it.
Fast: Fast and Dell offer this enormous full-text search of web content under the moniker "All the Web," and they want to spider your site as they attempt to create a multibillion-page web index. Results from Fast power other search portals, including Lycos.
Submission page: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request Home page: http://www.alltheweb.com/
Tips:
- Fast spiders audio and video content, in addition to HTML and image content. WONDERFUL!! - Fast supports the Robot Exclusion Protocol for content you do not want indexed. - Fast spiders slowly, retrieving a document from your site no faster than once every five seconds.
AltaVista: Launched in spring 1995 to showcase speedy Digital Alpha computer clusters, AltaVista now offers an enormous index of more than 350 million Web documents.
Submission page: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request Home page: http://www.altavista.com/
Tips:
- Use a title tag, or else AltaVista will return the title of your page as "No Title." - AltaVista indexes alt tags and encourages the use of keyword and description meta tags by indexing those also.
IAC Search and Media: Includes Ask.com, Excite.com, MyWay.com, iWon.com & more. Innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant information for millions of people every day.
Submission page: To get a human editor to review your site for inclusion, you must send an email to url@askjeeves.com. Be sure to include your website URL and a brief description of your website. Home page: http://www.ask.com
Tips:
- Ask's Expert Rank algorithm goes beyond link popularity to determine which pages are considered to be experts on the topic of the search. We love that because we teach you to become an expert.
MSN: Microsoft's answer to the search engine market. You'd better believe that MSN Search is a major player in this field.
Submission page: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx Home page: http://www.msn.com/
Tips:
- MSN recommends designing your pages with valuable content that your target audience is interested in...DUH! - Keyword density methods are screened and may result in lower ranking. No keyword spam
Do you see how easy this is, and how unnecessary it would be to have a service do it for you? Good, now get out there and makeit happen right now before you procrastinate.
Copyright (c) 2008 Dan Dimit
When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your visitors are going to see. What you have to realize, though, is that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a completely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at your pretty logo and they're not going to be passing judgment on your background color. What they're looking for is the content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.
Make Your Structure Clear.
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways: you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are. As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every 'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're quoting someone, use the block quote tag; if you're posting program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent.
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with keywords in hope of a higher search ranking ? the engines have pretty much wised up to this tactic ? but do make sure that your keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website' throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would bring down my rankings.
HTML and JavaScript.
It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't, in general, read JavaScript. That means that using JavaScript to insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search engines to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the page with JavaScript: this will tend to make your page appear more focused, although you should be careful not to insert navigation links this way if you want the search engines to follow them.
Use Meta Tags.
Yes, Meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site, but they're still important in one way: the Meta description tag is still often used to decide what text search engines' users see when they find your site in their results! This can be just as important as the ranking itself ? write something here that will look useful to the searcher, and you're more likely to get them to click-through. Don't forget that, while search engines are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages.
You might think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you would usually be, so you should avoid it ? it's annoying to visitors anyway.
Include Alt Tags.
Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it ? especially if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn't, then you'll be turning search engines away.
Finally, Write Great Content.
The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the thing you have least control over) is how many people decide to link to your page from their page. How can you make more people link to you? Make your content useful. Make it something they'll want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it's ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to make your content really stand out.
Both Dan Dimit & Sarbjot Singh are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.