Site Submission Services by Richard Lowe

Site Submission Services by Richard Lowe

This is a simple fact about life on the internet: if you have a web site you
must get it listed in all of the major search engines. In fact, not only
must the site get listed, but it must get listed "well".

What does this mean? It means you must spend some time designing your site
properly so the engines can make a good guess as to what it's about. You
see, search engines are robots - they are automated pieces of software which
examine your pages and attempt to decipher the subject(s). This translates
to words and phrases that the robots believe will allow best describe your
site to people who need your information.

What this actually means is for each page of your site, you must be able to
come up with some good keywords which accurately describe the contents of
that page. Once you've done that, you must scatter those keywords throughout
the page in various ways. The search engine robot will examine your pages,
see the keywords in places it likes, and determine your page is indeed about
that subject. For many engines, the better you do this the higher your site
will be in the results when someone searches using that keyword (this is
called ranking). And, as should be obvious, the higher you are in the
listings, the more hits you will receive.

Google is one of the most significant exceptions to this rule. It's primary
concern is not the keywords on your pages. No, Google actually looks at the
links to your pages and uses this information to determine your site's
ranking.

Making your pages "search engine friendly" is not difficult but it can be
tedious. The basic procedure is to pick a keyword which describes your page,
then scatter that keyword in various places: the title, description and
keyword Metatags, ALT tags on images, H1 and H2 headers and within the first
couple of paragraphs of text. To satisfy Google, you can get people to link
to the site with text including the keyword as well.

Okay, so now you've got some pages which are very descriptive to search
engines. How do you get them listed?

You submit them, of course.

Virtually all search engines have a page which allows you to submit one or
more URLs from your site. Some search engines are smart and require only a
single URL, others require as many URLs as you want to give them
(occasionally limiting the number that you can enter in a single day). All
of them have rules about spamming (making many submissions on a single day
or week, or trying to get your site better ranked using unethical means). So
be sure not to submit your site too often.

It can be a major pain to submit your site to the search engines. If you do
it manually, you have to get a list of as many search pages as you can,
visit each of them, find their submission page, then enter one or more URLs.
To be complete, you also need to do this again occasionally - perhaps once a
month or quarter. Even just submitting manually to the major 10 engines can
be a real pain.

So what do you do? I mean, a webmaster should really be spending most of his
time designing and creating his web pages, shouldn't he? Well, actually, yes
and no. Promotion is a major part of being a webmaster - a site must be seen
in order to be successful (otherwise why bother at all). Thus a webmaster
must promote his site, and he should be spending some time on this practice
every single day.

Of course, it would be silly to hand-submit your site to the thousands of
search engines and hundreds of thousands of FFA (Free for All List) pages.

One course of action is to hand submit your site to the major search
engines, then use submission services to submit it to the medium sized and
smaller ones. Don't forget about the directories, especially Yahoo,
Looksmart and DMOZ. These are very critical to getting traffic to your site.

There are many programs and services available to help you submit your site.
Some of these are good, others are a complete waste of time and money.

Submit Wolf
http://www.submitwolf.com/
This is a program into which you enter your site name, URL and details. The
program then can be used to perform automatic submissions to thousands of
search engines and FFA lists.

WebPosition Gold
http://www.webposition.com
Probably the best way to get your site listed well in the major search
engines. This product combines every tactic into one concise and easy-to-use
package.

Jim's Tools
http://www.jimtools.com/
This awesome site includes a full suite of tools to help you submit your
site to search engines, FFA lists and directories. Highly recommended.

Everything which submits to FFA pages
You will find hundreds (or even thousands) of services which claim to submit
to thousands, tens of thousands or even more "search engines". Actually,
what they are doing is submitting to FFA pages. FFA pages are completely
worthless as a promotional technique, and thus all of these services are
pure garbage. Don't even bother wasting a minute looking at them.

I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other site submission
services available. I look at them all with caution, as most of them are
highly overpriced and many use or promote unethical submission practices
(search engine spamming).
About the Author
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at
http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to read
over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.