Search Engines Submission
This is what hopefully will be the begining of a series of threads on webhosting, web marketing, etc. The first topic up is search engines submission. (This may take several articles…) It’s important to get your web site up and mostly fleshed out before submitting to search engines. Why? Although many may take some time before they spider your site, it is best to make sure that there is a fair amount of content available for them to spider. Some may actually spider fairly quickly, within minutes initially.
There are things you can do to help your standings in search results when you do submit your sites to search engines. One thing that I’ve noticed is that directories with their own index files seem to get spidered by google more quickly than other pages within the root directory of a site. Also, make sure that keywords relevant to your site are in the titles of the pages, the directory names, wherever relevant.
Once you feel as though your content is set (which could be a series of articles all it’s own.) How do you submit to the search engines? I’ve always been a bit reluctant to use these tools that will submit to thousands of search engines in one click. A small number of search engines (less than 5) drive most of the webs traffic. It’s good to start with those. I prefer manually submitting sites. Google for instance has an add url page. Submission is free.
Yahoo has a new site submission page with varying options, some free. MSN search also has a site submission form that’s free. Getting indexed by these three sites will greatly improve your visibility. (Google alone drives about 75% of this site’s traffic.) The only real frustration in the submission process is that sometimes it can take a while to show up in the index.
One other piece of advice would be to target search engines that specialize in your content. For instance if you’re a manufacturer, then look for manufacturing specific directories to submit to. You’ll likely get more targetted traffic that way. There’s no real secret to search engines submission. Just make sure to read the terms (some let you submit as many times as you like.) Finding free submission forms for some of the other engines is sometimes not as easy as it should be, but many will have a small link somewhere on the main page for you to “add your site”.