Search Engine Submission

Search Engine Submission Basics

A majority of search engines charge a fee for submission. There are also some good search engines that allow you to submit your site for free. There are a few search engines that offer free submission services. Although, listing of your website is not guaranteed through free submission, it is always recommend submitting your website to a search engine with free submission.

3.1 Search Engine Submission – Getting the Basics Right

Free listing is available with some major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and Webcrawler. As stated earlier, even after submission of your website, a listing is not guaranteed. Generally, it takes up to 2 to 3 months to be listed after submission. A recent research concluded that the audience potential for websites submitted through free search engines is about 39%.

Most search engines charge a nominal fee for every URL submitted. You are more likely to get favorable results by submitting your website to a search engine with paid inclusion. AskJeeves, Inktomi, AOL, and LookSmart are the most popular search engines in this category. Once you submit your website with these Search Engines, your website is most likely to be listed within a week. The Audience potential for paid search engines is 100%.

Search engines generally list pages of ten to twenty results per page. Most search items will return thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of results. The key, however, is to get listed amongst the top results if expect to get any traffic through these search engine results.

There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines. One is to use Search Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part of MSN Central. The fee for submitting URLs using this service ranges from $79 to $299 per year. Another is to submit your URL by submitting it individually to popular Search Engines and thus avoiding the fee charged by submission services. The prevailing counsel is that manual submissions should be made to the top five search engines or so and one could use automatic submission services for the rest.

It is possible to submit your URL to search engines for free. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that there are premium programs offered by some search engines that assure listing or provide better positioning in ranking. Some use of paid listing programs is recommended if you wish to receive serious traffic on your website from the search engine. Paid Listing Programs are explained later in this chapter. Free submission could result in much lower traffic, a low rank and positioning amongst the results returned, and longer period of time before your website actually shows up in the results returned by the search engine. Also there is no guarantee that your website would be included with these free services. To avoid these issues some search engines offer “paid participation” that guarantees high traffic and ranking for a fixed fee per year.

3.2 The Submission Budget

Formulating a Search Engine submission budget is crucial. It should be such that you have the best possible combination of free submission, paid submission and paid placement programs.

How much would you like to spend on this exercise? If the budget is limited, options such as some of the paid programs, advertisements, expensive directory listings will have to be forsaken and attention given to getting the best results from limited but focused efforts.

The key is to strike a balance between free and paid programs that yield maximum ROI. You should submit your website to all the free search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and WebCrawler, at least one paid search engine such as Inktomi ($89 for submission of
3 URLs), and Yahoo Directory ($299 a year). Apart from these, you should think of submitting your website to a couple of “paid participation” or “paid placement” programs such as Google Adwords and Overture, which are discussed later.

3.3 Submitting to Google

Google is probably the most widely used web crawler search engine. One way of letting Google automatically detect and include your web page URL is as discussed in the above paragraph. Submission to Google through its free listing program can be done using the 'Add URL' form available at

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Having mentioned that, there is no guarantee that Google would include a web page submitted to it by either of the free methods. Also, it might take as long as a month before Google lists your web pages.

Google has advertising program called Adwords that offers you a combination of paid listing and positioning of your pages in search results. Paid listings in Google appear above and to the side of its regular results. These are discussed in detail in the section on Paid Placement programs.

Google allows maximum 5 to 10 web pages from a website to be submitted per day.

Other web crawler search engines with both free as well as paid submission services are discussed below. The free submission method for these search engines is very similar to those described in the case of Google.

3.4 Submitting to Inktomi

To submit a homepage using Add URL, you would have to use one of Inktomi’s partners.

HotBot UK is recommended for this purpose.

HotBot UK Add URL - http://www.hotbot.lycos.co.uk/submit.html

The submission through the addurl feature is levied a penalty on ranking if that is the only way the page has been crawled. If the same page gets covered through normal crawling or through paid inclusion, the ranking penalty is removed.

Inktomi has a paid submission program called “Search Submit” that charges a fee of $39 a year for your homepage. More web pages can be added for $25 per web page. After a year, if you do not renew the service, Inktomi might drop your homepage. Inktomi’s partners sell this program.

Search Submit - http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html

Inktomi allows maximum 20 web pages from each website to be submitted per day. Inktomi also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time someone clicks on your web page listing.

3.5 Submitting to Fast Search

The Add URL page for Fast Search: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

With this it might take up to six weeks until your web pages show up.

Fast Search’s paid submission service cannot be accessed directly by you. It can be used through its partner Lycos. The fee for this service is $30 for one year. Additional pages can be submitted at $12 per page.

Paid submission service – http://search.lycos.com/searchservices/

Fast Search also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged every time someone clicks on your web page listing.

3.6 Submitting to Teoma

This is owned by Ask Jeeves, one of the popular search engines. Teoma, however, doesn’t have a free Add URL feature. Teoma, being a web crawler can always include your homepage for free if there are other web pages pointing to your homepage. Like other engines, it has a paid submission program for a fee of $30 a year. Additional pages can be submitted at $18 per page. Paid service can be accessed at:

Ask Jeeves/Teoma Site Submit - http://ask.ineedhits.com/

3.7 Submitting to AltaVista

This is another very popular search engine. AltaVista does have submission via the Add URL feature at http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl. As discussed with other search engines, free submission might take more than a month until your web pages show up. An automatic submission through submission software may not work with this URL,

as it requires insertion of a specific code that is displayed on entering the submission page.

Following services are offered by Alta Vista.

Express Inclusion

According to Alta Vista, this is the fastest method of including your URLs as Express Inclusion lets you add up to 500 URLs to AltaVista's search results within 2 business days. It does Daily refreshes (weekday only)and keeps your listings fresh.

Trusted Feed

This service is reserved for partners who submit more than 500 pages to the AltaVista database. Trusted Feed enables submission of custom titles, keywords and abstracts and provides the clients with highly qualified traffic through weekly updates.

Listing Enhancements

This service visually distinguish your pages in the AltaVista search results with Listing Enhancements. It also controls the look and feel of your results by adding logos, icons, custom taglines, and text links to your URLs.

Reseller Program

AltaVista's Reseller Program provides you with the opportunity to deliver highly qualified traffic to your clients' sites by using any of the following programs: Trusted Feed, Express Inclusion, and Listing Enhancements.

Basic Submit

This is the basic submit service which enables the clients to add or remove up to 5 URLs at a time from the AltaVista global database. URLs will generally be evaluated within four to six weeks of submission. Basic Submit is a free service. As discussed with other search engines, free submission might take more than a month until your web pages show up. An automatic submission through submission software may not work with this URL, as it requires insertion of a specific code that is displayed on entering the submission page.

AltaVista’s paid submission program has a fee of $39 per page for six months ($78 for a year).

For additional 2 to 10 web pages the fee is $58 per page per year, whereas for an additional 11 to 500 web pages the fee is $38. AltaVista also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time someone clicks on your web page.

Fortunately, there are ways to verify and whether your site has been listed or not. This is described in the section on “verify and monitor listing”.

3.8 Submitting to Directories

Directories are very popular and are widely used by people as a source of information. Web crawler search engines may also have better chances of finding your website if it is listed with any of these directories. Most of the directories charge a fee for listing your website. Some sites such as Yahoo offer free submission as well.

An important aspect of submitting your website to a directory is to have a 25 word or less description of the website. This allows the web crawler search engines to efficiently find and include your website.

Yahoo, LookSmart and Open Directory Project are some of the most popular directory services on the World Wide Web.

3.8.1 Yahoo

Yahoo provides two submission options: Free submission known as “Standard” and paid submission known as “Yahoo Express”. The free submission cannot be used for commercial websites. Also, with free submission there is no guarantee that your website will be approved for submission.

Submission of commercial websites can be done with Yahoo Express that has a fee of $299 per year. Although a majority of websites are accepted in this category, note that, paid submission also doesn’t guarantee acceptance of your website. It only ensures an answer whether your site was accepted or not. For non-commercial websites there is a one-time fee of $299.

For submission of free non-commercial websites you will have to fill up a submission form that is displayed once you click the “Suggest a Site” link at the bottom of each category. In case of paid commercial websites you would have to fill up the submission form that can be accessed at http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?+Business

3.8.2 LookSmart

LookSmart provides listings used by the very popular MSN Search service and AltaVista. Hence, like Yahoo, it is essential that you submit your website to LookSmart. LookSmart also provides two options for submission: Free submission for non-commercial websites and Paid submission for commercial as well as non-commercial websites.

LookSmart paid submission charges you a nominal fee every time a click is registered against your website. Free submission cannot be done directly from LookSmart. It has to be done through a site owned by LookSmart known as Zeal.com. The sign-up form for this is available at http://www.zeal.com/users/become_a_zealot.jhtml

Once your website is approved for submission, you can submit your website by using the “Manage” link at the top of each of the categories.

3.8.3 Open Directory

Having your website listed with Open Directory is essential. It provides results to Google, AOL, Lycos and Netscape Search. Open Directory doesn’t have a paid submission service. Commercial as well as non-commercial websites can be submitted to Open Directory absolutely free of cost. This, however, has its drawbacks.

There is no guarantee if and when your website will be approved for submission. Having mentioned that, Open Directory does generate high traffic for your website, once approved. Thus, submission to this directory is worth the uncertainty involved.

Submission can be done by using the “Add URL” link at the top of each of the categories. Generally, if your website is accepted, it would appear within the directory in about three weeks’ time. If rejected, there is no limit to how many times you can resubmit your website.

These are three most important Directories on the World Wide Web. Getting your site listed on each of these is a must as it can lead to a significantly large audience for your website.

3.8.4 Some tips for Submission to Directories

The maximum length of the Title of the website should be 60 characters for Yahoo, 65 characters for LookSmart and 100 characters for Open Directory.

Description of your website is essential for submission to any Directory. The maximum length of this description for Yahoo is 25 words or 200 characters, 170 characters for LookSmart and 25 to 30 words for Open Directory.

Yahoo requires that you submit the Title, Description, Your name and Email for website submission, whereas LookSmart and Open Directory only require the Title and Description of the website.

Yahoo allows a maximum submission for one category per website; LookSmart and Open Directory allow a maximum submission for one category per URL.

3.9 Submitting to the big ones

There are currently hundreds of search engines out there, most of them are not much more than an advanced FFA page. You can surely not submit your site to each of these. The best strategy to follow is to use automated submittal software as discussed earlier for the Search Engines that are less popular, while hand submitting to the top 10 Search Engines.

Beware of the ads such as 'submit to the top 500 search engines for only $99', because generally only the top 10 will drive traffic to your site. It doesn’t take much time to manually submit to these top engines and your $99 could better be spent on overture.com or buying ads in ezines or whatever.

At the moment the top ten search sites - meaning both directories and search engines account for just over 93% of all search engine traffic. The other 6.something% is made up of hundreds of sites claiming to be search engines. Even at that the 11th - 15th biggest search engines make up most of that figure. So what are the search sites you need to concentrate on? Some of the top search engines are discussed above. There are a few others which are also quite popular. The following is a suggested list of search engines and directories.

• Yahoo.com

• Dmoz.com (ODP)

• Looksmart.com

• Google.com

• Alltheweb.com (Fast)

• Inktomi (AOL, Hotbot, MSN + more)

• Altavista.com

• Lycos.com

• Teoma

• Overture.com (GoTo.com) Paid Inclusion

• Directhit.com

• Askjeeves.com

A short guide to better Google ranking!

A short list of what is least to most important.

Internal link text 10 point
Title: 10 point
The domain name: 7 point
H1-H2 text: 5 point
The first word in one sentence: 5 point
The path or filename: 4 point
an adjacent keyword (multi keywords): 4 point
The beginning of a sentence: point
Bold or italics textual: 1 point (textual or (textual)
Use in textual: 1 point
Alt tag: 0.5 point
Meta description: 0.5 point
Meta keywords: 0.05 point

Make many separate pages with text-content
One "sitemap" that links to all pages on the site, one that is searchengine friendly for both people and robots. An optimiz title and "H1" text can take you a long way without optimization.

The less the page is weighing in bytes, the more Google will like it. Use stylesheets instead of font tags, and put your javascripts in external files.

Links
The external link's text is important, but is often very difficult to check.. To have The Google Toolbar installed will help you a lot. Page rank is important, but like the rest of the "SEO" process is important, it is not a magic wand taking you to the top like a rocket.

Page rank should be a secondary priority when asking for, or accepting reciprocal links. A reciprocal link with a "PR" higher than yours give you a higher "PR", but even links from lower ranked sites count.

Use (www.alltheweb.com) to see ALL incoming links disregarding their ranking. (Type all.link:(http://www.domain.com) )

Other searches: "link:(www.domain.com) " "allinurl:(www.domain. com) " "allinanchor: word or phrase" Bigger sites with lots of pages and a correct "site map" have advantages in their size thru their internal links according to the "bigger being the better" principle. More unique pages that each can be optimized with individual phrases. (Perhaps that´s why we write all these articles about "SEO") Every page should be seen as a search engine optimation.

To read more about linking, download the book powerlinkingreport here: (http://www.emarketingprofit.com/powerlinkingreport.zip)

Google doesn´t always use the page that you optimized, it uses the index page which is the page with the highest "PR".

PageRank is no miracle by itself and a page with lower "PR" can get higher in searches.

There is a very powerful software called RankingPower you can read more about it here: (http://www.emarketingprofit.com/rankingpower.html)

Google have two different robots, that is sends (crawling). One is called Freshbot and the other Deepbot Fresh has IP 64..... and Deepbot 216.... I have seen Freshbot acting more like Deepbot lately. Freshbot capture new pages and update your ranking, Deepbot usually goes thru your site very carefully for a couple of days and suddenly it disappear
.
It is the result from these "crawls" that use to result in Google´s monthly updates. But there are ideas that Google uses Freshbot´s results more aggressively to present placements and results.

Google update its main index once every month.

The process of update before the result reaches the main data bank can be seen on www2 and www3 and you can find lots of googledance tools on the web, one place is here: (http://www.free-webmaster-tools.com/google_dance_tool.htm)

Google Dance is the the time that Google is updating their main database and you find rankings"dancing" up and down, being mixed, finally everything become stabilised and your rank has hopefully gone up.

Just a few months ago it would take days for a index to be filtered thru the databases (the different Google servers) before the results could be seen on Google´s main site,but the last updates have run very fast.

It still takes up to 3 days before Pagerank and search-results are stabile.

The indexes on Yahoo are dragging a bit, and the AOL indexes are dragging even more behind Google. ( As you guessed, they take their results from Google )

It still takes quite long time before your optimizations start working, you have to be patient.

To achieve direct visibility, the only choice is Pay Per Click (AdWords or Overture) or quick inclusion (All The Web/Lycos) cost between $0.05 /click and $100 / year.

Optimize your robots.txt file so your image / cgi-folders won´t be spidered, use the option noindex as option for that you don´t want indexed see the robots.txt tutor on: (http://www.emarketingprofit.com/webmastertools/robots_tutor). html

There is no point in adding as many keywords you can think of.

Remember Google need some time to index your entire site, if there are many pages and a lot of links.

The rules / conditions described are subject to change and are not guaranteed to be correct at all times.

The Budget Webmaster's 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren't getting more clicks, and you find out that you're ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. Great, you think, I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it's a worthless ranking.

Not necessarily.

If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game's not over yet. If your site's content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?

The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you'd spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.

Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to: (http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php)

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you're ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to: (http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/)

I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it's also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You'll need a free Google API key to use it.

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here: (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/)

Okay, let's say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won't be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts.

Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.

This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details - (http://www.gorank.com)

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you're almost done.

Great, you're all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?

Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don't mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There's been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member's sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight my site didn't start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.

So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you're better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That's the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it's great new changes.

And yes, there's an even faster, better way to get Google.com's search engine spider to re-index that page, but that's another article, isn't it?

Being dumped by Google? Learn how to avoid becoming a victim next time around!

After Google latest update nicknamed "Florida", many webmasters discovered that their traffic plummeted.

What happened?

More importantly what can you do about it?

And what will Google do next?

What happened was that Google made an algorithm change on how they rate web pages.

Every time you make a search, Google tries to show the most relevant web pages that match your search term. By being able to give the most relevant results for queries, they have become the most used search engine in the world.

In order to keep out competitors they have to constantly adjust and improve how they judge web pages.

Because this judgment is done automatically using software, many webmaster have been modifying their sites in order to improve their position in the search results. To do this they have exploited different shortcuts and loopholes made possible by shortcomings in the software algorithm.

Periodically Google make changes in order to stop some webmasters to get unfair advantages by plugging one or two of the loopholes.

This is what happened during the Florida update.

With this update Google introduced new algorithms which intended to stop overuse of some search engine optimization techniques.

More specifically they seem to have targeted search terms found in text links also called anchor text. Web pages with good positions in the search result, which had had a disproportional number of in-bound links to them from other web pages with the exact same search term in the anchor text that the page was optimized for suddenly, disappeared from the listings.

The pages did not disappear altogether. Just for the search term that the page were optimized for.

For Google, the high proportions of anchor texts with the same text indicate that the texts were put there for one purpose only, to boost ranking.

One suggestion for you is to spread out the anchor text with a mix of different texts to keep your page in the search results. We don't know if your pages will come back after some time if you do this, but it is likely.

Apparently the search result generated after the latest update have been of a lower quality than before.

What seems to have happen is that a large percentage of web sites have traded links with one another. This link trade has been done with the same search term in the anchor text that they have optimized their pages for.

The victims more often than not have been commercial web sites that relied to heavily on search engine optimization technique.

The search results have been taken over by web sites composed of low quality directory and link farms.

Now, what will Google do next?

I don't know, but TRY TO THINK like Google! This is what I would do if I was responsible at Google for this.

First I think that they will modify and adjust the new algorithm they have introduced during the latest update. Changing the threshold or don't let the "over optimized pages" drop out of the search result so easy, but rather penalize them and put them under the threshold point.

I think, Google have a problem! You see, many "over optimized" sites are of higher quality that those that are not. To simply drop them out and say that there are enough pages for the same search term is not always true.

There is a thin line between optimization and spamming and where this boundary should be.

After this, what will Google do next? It is clear to me that the many low quality directory sites found in Google search results is a nuance to Google and to the average web user.

It is in this area that, I think, they will make the next modifications.

Google rate web pages according to relevance. The level of relevance is judge based on the web page content and/or how popular the web page is in the view of Google.

To get a page popular you need to have links from other pages. This can come from pages on your own site or from other sites.

Ideally these links should be many, come from pages dealing with similar or identical subject or come from pages that themselves are popular. The best is to have many links from pages dealing with the same subject that themselves are popular.

This had led to an intense link exchange active among webmasters. And the primary reason has been to achieve better ratings. The primary purpose has not been to increase the visitors experience value.

This goes against Google's principles.

To quote Google webmaster guidelines: Make pages for users, not for search engines. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or Page Rank.

To counter this I think Google will target several popularity increasing schemes like:

- Low value directory sites which have been created automatically by robots. These sites contain extracts taken from search engines and directories.

Google can easily spot these sites.

- The building of link directories attached to web sites. They are built with link partner extracting software and services. With them you can upload directory structures directly into your site. This way you can build up a massive number of link partners and also identify link partners with high Page Rank values.

Of course, one can say that by doing this you can add to your visitors experience as the directories make it easy for them to find similar web sites.

However this is an argument that Google most likely would disagree with.

Web sites using tactics like this are easy identifiable by Google. The directory pages are composed of outgoing links which either have the Title, Meta descriptor or other content directly taken from the web pages they are linked to.

Google just have to look at the texts from the directories and the text on the web pages for matching.

Using product or services for this purpose is risking you get banned or at least being penalized by Google.

Will this happen? I think so!

When?

I don't know! Anytime soon, next month,..next year! Nobody knows, only Google can tell!

I think Google also will look into reciprocal linking as a whole.

Maybe they will start to identify pages with outgoing links on them that link to other web sites and identify which links are coming back from those domains.

What they like to see is spontaneous linking to your site from web owners that regard you as a valuable resource to link to, without you linking back. I believe that they will limit the impact of reciprocal linking, somewhat!

What can you do to improve your web traffic from Google without violating its guidelines?

Build web sites that give value to your visitors. Make it into a popular site, so that others want to link to your site. Build niche information rich sites. Either as mini sites or as larger information sites. Larger sites within a niche are given higher popularity rating than smaller sites by Google.

If you do this your web site will not be affected next time Google make a change. Unless of course your competitor drops out of Google, then your traffic will get a boost.