Search Engine Submission Basics
July 19, 2007With the quality, sophistication, and speed of today’s search engine spiders, submitting a website to the search engines is almost unnecessary. Eventually, just about any site will get picked up by the spiders and be indexed in the major search engines. But there are three things that you should do, at a minimum, to get listed and ranked by the search engines:
Get another website to link to you
In order for your site to be picked up automatically, it must be linked to from a site that a spider already visits. The spider will follow the link to your site and crawl it. But even if you are able to get some other website to link to you, it could take some time for the spiders to get around to you. Spiders crawl a site regularly depending on how often the content is updated. If the link to your site comes from one that is highly static and doesn’t change or rarely has any new content added to it, then spiders won’t visit it very often, which means you won’t get picked up for awhile. Additionally, you have no control over when, how, or even if spiders will actually visit you. When you create a new website, the idea is to get people visiting it. Since almost all web surfers use search engines to get around, getting listed in all the major ones should be a priority.
Manually submit your site
The way to guarantee that the search engines know about you is by manually submitting your site to them, essentially telling the search engines, “Hey, here I am! Come check me out!” It’s a bit more effective than sitting around and waiting. But before submitting a site to the search engines, you want to make sure that your site is optimized for their spiders. Very simply, this means having good navigation, a complete site map, and no dead-end pages (pages that don’t have a link to another page at the end of it). Once you’ve got your website primed for crawling by the spiders, you can manually submit your website at the following places:
Those are the three largest search engines. Many smaller search engines don’t allow manual submissions. Many smaller engines rely on the larger ones, using their results to create their own. Therefore, getting listed in the three big ones means you’ll be listed in most of the smaller ones as well.
List your site in online directories
There are many online directories out there. Some are free to list with, others charge a fee. Getting listed with more popular directories will not only virtually guarantee that the search engines pick you up, but it will also improve your relevance, even if only a little, in the eyes of the search engines. It is for this reason that if you choose only one directory to get listed in, you should get listed in the Yahoo! Directory. The Yahoo! Directory has a $299 fee just to have your submission looked at, and does not guarantee that you will be listed. There are a number of reasons why your submission might get turned down, including submitting to an unrelated category or having a poorly written site description. Every Yahoo! Directory submission is reviewed by a human, and final judgment lies with that reviewer. So before forking over the $299, make sure that everything is in tip-top order. Once accepted, there is a $299 recurring annual fee to maintain your listing in the directory. The Yahoo! Directory is considered to be highly relevant, which is why being listed there will give your site a boost in search engine rankings, not to mention the fact that the directory is viewed by millions of web surfers.
Another highly relevant directory that is free is DMOZ Open Directory Project. Although it’s free, it does have its flaws. Directory submissions must be reviewed by a human editor, all of whom are volunteers. Not every category has an active editor. There have been accusations that webmasters become editors for a category to ensure that competing sites stay out, which naturally would make it difficult for you to get listed. In many cases the only way to ensure that your submission will be looked at is to become the editor for the category you’re submitting to.
Online In Local is another free directory that is specialized for local businesses.