Submitting your site to search engines and directories

Continued from chapter five

There is a very real value in making sure that your website is submitted to EVERY internet search engine..one-by-one. While the larger engines admittedly make up MOST of the traffic you'll  receive, smaller engines still make up nearly 10%. Can you afford to lose  out on THAT much business simply because you didn't take the time to submit  your site?   Be sure to read the submission guidelines on each individual directory or search engine.  Failure to do so might mean failure to be listed.  

Yes, you can purchase software which will automate this process, such as AddMe, Add Ace, Add Web, Search Engine Commando, Traffic Seeker, Web Position Gold and Web Position Wizard.  Remember, YMMV (your mileage may vary.)

The Big Four

AltaVista   You can enter every page of your site separately, but don't do more than ten pages a day.  Make sure your meta tags are set up correctly with "description" and "keywords" properly defined. Believed to index META and ALT tags but not comment tags.  Case-sensitive. Will not increase your ranking if other sites link to you.   It appears that AltaVista weights the <TITLE> tag of the site the heaviest -- if your key word phrase is in the title of the page, it will probably come up well in the rankings in a search for that phrase at AltaVista.  Charges for all submission pages over 5. 

Excite Minimum charge:  $50 a year.  Dogpile, Verizon,  NBC,  Webcrawler and Metacrawler use this as one of their databases.  Believed to index META tags but not comment tags. Not case-sensitive.  Will increase your ranking if other sites link to you.  

Google  Add only your domain name, their spider will pick up the rest. If you want to submit each page individually, submit no more than 5 pages per day.  Ranks by popularity. Takes info from DMOZ.

Yahoo  This is a directory.  You must navigate to the the category where you would like to be listed before submitting your site.  Will properly index frames.  Has ended free submissions.  Charges $300 per year per listing.  

The best of the rest

Claymont (must register first)

DMOZ. An open directory project.  Several other search engines take their information from DMOZ - AOL, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search, etc.  Believed to index both META and comment tags.  Will not increase your ranking if other sites link to you.  Gives a higher ranking to sites with the keyword in their URL.  Will properly index frames.

Galaxy  (min charge $9.95)

Inktomi Database ( AKA Lycos) The big database used by Hotbot and others. Enter only your main page.   Do not resubmit any pages to Inktomi engines. They are penalizing repeat submissions.  ($23 yr)

Jayde Online Directory

Link Mania

MasterSite  ($19.95 yr)

MSN Incorporates results from Overture, Inktomi and LookSmart, as well as listings by their human editorial staff.  Charges for listings, although you can suggest a site for free. 

Overture

Scrub The Web

Search 2 Go

Search It

SearchEngine

Splat Search

Surf Gopher

Where2Go (businesses only)

Zen Search

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