Search Engine Submission in a Changed Search
World
Basics of Search Engine Submission in a Changed
Search World
by Mike Banks Valentine
To Search Engine Optimizers, who submit client
sites on a regular basis to the search engines,
it can seem as though submitting sites via the
standard forms at those sites is the most mundane
and routine part of our jobs. It's easy to forget
the host of small business webmasters out there
who do it themselves and need guidance through
the maze of submission confusion.
It used to be a long and arduous task to submit
to all search engines, but it is now becoming
increasingly unnecessary to submit your site at
all! Some Search Engine Specialists are advocating
simply submitting to the Open Directory Project
and then waiting for the search engine spiders
to crawl your site.
I propose a middle ground of dedicating about
$150 to submit to the paid inclusion programs
then the Open Directory Project and then wait
to be spidered by the balance, whose numbers are
slowly dwindling as search properties are bought
and sold and others simply fade away or die in
corporate mega-mergers.
Here's an article on the Overture
purchase of both Fast/AllTheWeb and AltaVista
And a previous
article about the purchase of Inktomi by Yahoo!
I have a list of submission URL's bookmarked in
my browser, so it is simply a matter of quickly
scrolling through the list and jumping to the
next submission page. But since the advent of
the paid inclusion programs at many search engines,
some webmasters may think that paying is the only
way to get listed anymore.
NOT SO! Submitting to search engines is usually
done by visiting their front page and scrolling
down to the bottom of the page where you will
see a link titled 'Add URL' OR 'Add Your Site'
or 'Submit a Site' and must be done directly at
each search engine. Here are the submission URL's
for the top "crawler- based" search
engines. Click on the links below and fill out
each of the forms.
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new
http://insite.lycos.com/searchservices/
(look for the link that says "free submission")
Make sure you submit to the two major directories
as well! The Open Directory Project is free http://dmoz.org/add.html
Yahoo costs $299. I'll leave it to your budget
to decide if you'll Yahoo! http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
It used to be common to see ads everywhere offering
to submit your site to 1500 search engines where
third party services submitted your site for you.
Search Engines began to see these third party
submissions done by automated software as spam
and stopped allowing automated submissions or
ignored those submissions if they came from an
IP address recognized as an automated service.
Some search engines even began to thwart automated
submissions by requiring submitters to enter a
visual password presented on the page in a form
field on that submission page to block the autobots
from entry.
It has become standard industry practice to submit
sites by hand, visiting each search engine and
going to their submission page to fill out a brief
form requesting that they index your site and
include it in their database. It always takes
time to get listed since there are constant new
submissions as well as regular resubmissions by
sites with new content that they would like to
have "crawled" by that search engine.
The alternative to free submissions is to submit
your site to what are called "Paid Inclusion"
programs which charge a fee to include your site
in their index. The great part about paid inclusion
programs is that they list your site within a
week of your paid submission and the three major
programs cost between $29 and $39 per URL for
up to a year of inclusion in their listings.
Below is the sign-up page for the top paid inclusion
programs at Inktomi, AskJeeves and Lycos.
https://secure.positiontech.com/enroll/enroll.cfm
You can enroll in three separate programs from
the above site.
The following link allows you to sign up for AltaVista
Express Inclusion, their paid inclusion program.
https://www.infospider.com/av/app/signup
The paid inclusion programs for AltaVista, AskJeeves,
Lycos and Inktomi will cost you just over $100
as of this writing and get your site listed by
all their partners within a week. Those partnerships
are changing constantly but include the largest
portals and search properties online and paying
for inclusion in the four programs above get you
listed at MSN search, AOL search, About.com, and
dozens of major portals.
Here is a link to a list of more search engines,
paid inclusion programs and directories to submit
your site. http://www.website101.com/Search_Engine_Positioning/search_engines_guide.html
None of these submissions are guaranteed to rank
your site highly, just to include it in their
index. How to rank highly?
That project I'll leave to you, but you can get
a great start by visiting the search engine tutorial
library at this URL:
http://searchengineoptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/index.html
Submission is not enough!
The most important of all activities involving
search engines is optimizing your web site with
a page architecture that is search engine friendly
using keywords in the title tag, in the header
tags above your main body of text and in the first
few lines of text on your page, then sprinkled
about throughout the body text at a rate of between
three and five percent of total words within the
page text. If you have a page with 400 words of
text, using your keyword phrase between 8-12 times
on the body copy on that page would be best for
optimal ranking. Use that same keyword phrase
to link to other pages within your site that are
relevant to that phrase and link to filenames
that use words within your keyword phrase.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimizer
specializing in ethical small business SEO
http://SEOptimism.com/
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