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
