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
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| Search
Engine Submission |
| Key success factors |
|
|
