How to Submite Site to Search Engines
What Can You Expect From Search Engines And
How They Can Help You
Search engines will be a way for you to generate
from as little as 20% to as much as 60% of your business
online (depending on what other marketing techniques you
use). Since there are over 130,000,000 webpages in existence
(yes that is 130 million!), it is extremely important
to understand how they work and how to increase your chances
of being placed in the top 20 of the search results. For
example, if you were to type "music" and "CD" into the
AltaVista search engine as a keyword the result
would be over 1,000,000 related site URLs.
Search engines are a very powerful tool
if you are in the top 50 results (preferably the top 20),
but are completely useless if you are listed further
down. You can bet that if you are further down than the
50th result, the searchee will not even see your site
listing, much less be able to visit it.
As we all know, the beauty of search engines
is that they can bring you a large amount of targeted
traffic and it will not cost you a cent!
It is crucial you understand the basics of
how search engines work if you want to get traffic to
your site from them. There are three main types of search
engines/directories. The first is a directory (sometimes
called a category database). This is not a true search
engine, but a listing of webpages by category. Many directories
allow you to enter in the description and keywords for
your site exactly as you would like them to appear.
You usually have to select the category you want it cited
under, too.
A directory will not list your URL and will
never become aware of your site if you do not register
with them. They do not make use of "indexing software"
(robots that crawl the web looking for new sites and indexing
them). An example of a directory is Yahoo.
Search engines (also called crawlers, spiders,
robots, and worms) vary to a large degree. They will automatically
index your site using "indexing software" or "indexing
robots".
Depending on the complexity of the software,
here is what different search engines might do:
- Index the webpage (not the entire "website")
you give them.
- Index every word of every page at that
site.
- Visit external links to crawl through
the web looking for any new sites 24 hours a day, 7
days a week going from URL to URL until they have visited
every website that can be found on the Internet.
By simply telling the search engine what
your URL is, its software robot will go there automatically
and index everything they need. Every search engine has
different criteria for returning search results which makes
a difference on how you want to submit your site as it can
drastically effect your ranking in search engines (we discuss
this quite extensively in the course, but it takes up over
30 pages, so we will skip it in this newsletter).
It is important to realize that many search
engines change their algorithms on a regular basis (i.e.
weekly, monthly, etc.) - if you're listed prominently
today, that may no be true tomorrow.
There are also META search engines. These
perform searches on multiple search engines simultaneously.
In this instance, your ranking for the keywords inputted
is calculated by the combined ranking of all the search
engines simultaneously used. The key to getting ranked
high is to make sure you're listed in all the search
engines used by the META search engines (They use: OpenText,
Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek ,
Excite, AltaVista, Yahoo, HotBot,
and Einet Galaxy).
It is not necessary to submit your site
to META search engines since they use the results
of the major search engines (not their own).
More articles:
