Search engine submission
Search engines
are one of the most important ways to gain
traffic. Altavista, Google, FAST, Lycos and many
others receive more hits than you and I can ever
even dream to. By submitting to them, you'll be
able to capture a small part of the huge
audience that uses search engines every day.
This article explains the search engine
submission process in detail. Read the other
articles in this section for instructions on how
to prepare your pages for the submission.
Where to submit and how?
Before submitting, you must of course find a
place to submit to. I would recommend that you
focus your search engine submission efforts to
the top search engines, as they are capable of
providing you with serious traffic. It is my
experience that these big engines provide the
most visitors compared to the time spent on
optimizing the pages and submitting them.
This doesn't mean that you should completely
ignore the smaller engines that aren't mentioned
in that article, but it does mean that you
should focus on the big ones. If you can rank
well in just one or two of the major search
engines, the traffic you'll receive will in most
cases surpass that of 20 minor engines put
together.
I've handled this matter by hand-submitting to
the big engines and by using a search engine
submission tool such as Selfpromotion to submit
to the smaller engines. Submitting to them via
an automated tool is in my opinion a
cost-effective move in terms of traffic
received/time spent, but after that I just
forget about the smaller search engines. I don't
monitor my rankings in them and neither do I try
to optimize my pages to please their algorithms,
as I feel that the time required in order to do
so is better spent on further studying the major
engines.
My relationship with the big engines is
completely different from the one I have with
the small ones. After I've submitted, I keep an
eye on my rankings in the big engines and try to
continuously tweak my pages so that they would
appear closer to the top in the search results.
If I lose a good ranking under an important
keyword, I can immediately notice the change in
the amount of visitors I receive.
Thus, with the major engines, the game doesn't
stop when your search engine submission process
is complete - that's when it starts! You can
gain traffic just by submitting your pages to
all of the engines and then forgetting about
them, but it is nothing compared to what you can
achieve if you optimize your pages and
continuously change them to match any changes in
the algorithm.
Submitting all pages vs. submitting just one
page
A question that is often asked in the Usenet
newsgroups and various discussion forums is
"Should I submit just one of my pages, or all of
them?". The answer to that question is: It
depends on where you're submitting to. If you're
submitting to website directories, you should
usually only submit your home page and nothing
else. But if your are targeting the search
engines and as you're reading this, you probably
are, the answer is: Submit all of your pages.
In the good old days, you could just submit your
home page and the search engines would follow
the links on that page & automatically register
the rest of the pages on your site. However,
things have changed and you now have to submit
all of the pages you want to have included in
the search engine's index. As having more pages
in the database increases the chances of your
site coming up, the only way to succeed is to
grab a cup of coffee and start feeding the pages
to the search engines one by one... Google and
FAST are positive exceptions to this rule, as
they still follow links aggressively. If you're
submitting to these two, it's usually enough to
only register your home page with both of them
as they will automatically follow the links on
it and index the other pages.
When you're submitting the individual pages to
different engines, try to register a maximum of
five per day per engine. You probably won't get
hurt if you exceed that number, but as
submitting very large numbers of pages in the
course of one day might give your site unwanted
attention or cause the search engine to drop
some of your submissions, it is better to just
stick with the '5 per day per engine' rule,
unless your site is really big.
I've submitted, how do I know my pages are
there?
Search for them. You can usually find your
pages by entering "URL:yourpageslocationhere"
(w/o the quotes) into the search field,
sometimes just "yourpageslocationhere" is
enough. Some engines don't support these
methods, but offer a Power Search/Advanced
Search feature that allows you to look for pages
located in a specific domain.
If you can't find your pages, it might be that
they are not included in the index. If that is
the situation, don't panic. It always takes the
search engine a while to index content after it
has been submitted, so be patient. Don't
resubmit the pages unless it has been about
three weeks since you submitted and you still
can't find them in the database.
In some cases, the pages have not been indexed
because their design or filetype is incompatible
with the search engine. If you fear that this
might be the case, read "Website optimization"
from this site.
When should I resubmit to search engines?
When there's a need to do so. Some people say
that you should resubmit every two weeks or
every month. I say to you - don't listen to
them. Resubmitting just for the sake of doing it
does usually more harm than good. Some search
engines appear to slightly prefer older pages
over brand new pages, so by resubmitting when
you really have no need to do so, you're wasting
your time and perhaps even damaging your
ranking.
You should only resubmit if :
- The page has disappeared from the
database or never appeared there in the
first place.
- Your rankings have dropped / are low and
you have made some changes to the page that
you think will boost your ranking. In this
case, it is recommended that you resubmit in
order to make the search engine 'see' the
changes you've made.
- Don't be afraid of resubmitting your
pages if you have to, but don't do it just
because it's possible.
To discuss your requirements
further, please feel free to
contact us at any time. We would be delighted to
offer our best to you. |
