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A Short Tutorial on Website Submissions & Linking to your site
Submitting your site to the search engines is a pain, make no
mistake. But with a top twenty listing on Webcrawler alone
having the capability to bring 50 visitors a day to your pages
it's a pain that is worth suffering.
There are a great number of search engines around, but only the
top 15 or so really generate serious traffic for most sites.
Many of the lesser
search engines are 'meta search' types, meaning they actually get
their results from the bigger engines anyway.
Of the main engines, there are two categories - Directory based,
and Spidered based.
The Directory based (which includes Yahoo, Looksmart and the Open
Directory Project) are generally added by hand. This means an
editor for the chosen category looks at your site and awards it a
position (or not) based on how he/she rated it.
The Spider index types, (including Lycos, Inktomi and AltaVista)
use robot browsers to check and index the sites based on
pre-programmed criteria.
In general, to get a good listing in the Directory engines means
you must impress the editor with the look, ease of navigation and
content of your site. Make sure your first page loads very
quickly (empty your browser cache before checking) as this is an
important factor. If your 'front' page doesn't open within 10 -
15 seconds you will not get a high placement. If need be, create
a simple 'Welcome' page that opens quickly and use it as a front
door to your site with the more graphic laden pages with in it.
With Directory engines, if you have midis on your page be sure
you include an "off " control. You will be penalized if not.
Don't over do images or clutter - the editors read hundreds of
these sites a day and will be likely to have a lot in the queue
behind you. They want to judge your site rather than your taste
in art or cartoons and music selections.
Spider based engines are more predictable. Spiders scan your
pages looking for your keywords, count the number of times the
keyword occurs through out that page, and measure it against the
overall length of your text to calculate how relevant your site
is to the keyword.
Your keywords need to be set in the keywords meta tag, and should
also be included in your description, and to occur AT LEAST once
in the first 200 characters of text in your page. For this reason
it is wise to not try to target too many keywords on a single
page, try to pick simple word-pairs. Make sure you pick phrases
or words that you will repeat several times in the actual text of
your page and that they describe your site to a viewer not to a
robot.
For the same reasons of relevance to keywords, try to stick to
one specific topic per page. If you deal with two different
topics then you risk the chance of only 50% of the page being
deemed relevant to either topic.
Assuming your site is now optimized to be rated by the engines
you need to start submitting. There are some tricks to this too.
Firstly, submitting to FFA (Free For All) Links pages is a good
idea. Most spiders will place your site far more highly if they
have found lots of other sites linking to you. Once you submit
to any Spidered Search Engine you should add your site to as many
FFA pages as you can find, once per day, for about two weeks. You
will get a lot of junk mail in response to these submissions -
one from each site generally, but most have exactly the same text
in them so you can set your mail program to automatically delete
them by using filter settings.
The best value listings of all are the Inktomi database. Those
used by Yahoo, Hotbot, ICQit and many others, and the ODP (Open
Directory Project) which is used by a list of Engines too long to
even consider listing. Getting into the ODP database is now the
only way to get listed in the AOL net search. AOL use spiders to
index sites found in the ODP directory so you can see why it
would be so important to be listed.
Top Five Directory Databases
(1) Open Directory
(2) Snap
(3) Yahoo! Web Sites (Inktomi)
(4) Yahoo! Directory
(5) LookSmart
Normally, you will submit to these directories one time for a
given web site. It is extremely important that you submit to them
correctly the first
time and choose the very best category. Be aware that it's often
difficult to get a directory to change your listing later unless
you send them a letter of explanation.
Here's where it gets complicated:
Submitting to
(6) HotBot (an engine) - will get you listed in all Inktomi
based engines.
(7) Netscape: Netscape draws its results from Open Directory
first. If no matches are found there, then it searches
(8) Google. Therefore, we submit to Open Directory (a directory)
and Google (an engine) to become listed on Netscape.
(9) AOL Search: AOL will search Open Directory listings first.
After those matches are displayed, it will then draw results from
Inktomi. Again, we submit to Open Directory using our directory
guide, and to HotBot to be fully listed in AOL Search.
(10) Magellan: By submitting to Excite will get you listed here.
(11) Excite will get you listed in Magellan. They pull from each
other's database.
(12) MSN: MSN draws results from LookSmart.com first, then after
that, matches are displayed from
(13) AltaVista. Therefore, we submit at www.looksmart.com (a
directory) and to AltaVista to be found in MSN.
Additionally there are very popular Search engines to submit to
that can be found on many web sites using search box's.
(14) Infoseek/Go Network
(15) Lycos
(16) Planet Search
(17) WebCrawler
(18) What-U-Seek
(19) WhatsNu
(20) Northern Light
I hope the information given will aid you to get your sites
placed in the search engines so give some thought to your
keywords, check your load times, make sure your site is easy to
navigate, and get submitting.
To learn more about how Search engines rate sites and other tips
I would recommend visiting
http://www.searchenginewatch.com
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Resubmission's are just as important
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After all the hard work you've done to submit your site, don't
neglect it ......
Read More ...
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