The hard and winding road to Search Engine top ranking

By Johan Oun
Posted Tuesday, October 12, 2004

During the last period of time I have been coding scripts for our site, that let webmasters submit their pages to over 90 searchengines, indexes and directories (there is a difference between these three categories!) - and boy, have I learned that it must have been far easier for the camels? to pass through the eye of the needle (or whatever they where passing?), than for a site to get high ranked at the major search engines!

In order to collect data for writing the scripts, I have been constantly surfing round the net picking up all information needed. The way the scripts work are quite straightforward, they mainly emulate the forms on the "add-new-url" pages on each searchengine, directory or index, doing so "plugging" in the actual submitting-site-data in the forms, nice and tidy!

This surfing around has given me a huge insight in how the different searchengines are acting and responding, as well as where and how you can promote your site on the web. As a matter of fact, I think have manually spidered the bigger part of the "web-promotion-related-community" on the net.

On our site I have also written tutorials on these matters, doing so surfing around to find what the real Gurus have to say and teach. This has helped me a lot.

Now this struggling part of my life seems to come to some sort of final, and I have been using our site to promote itself! Really a funny experience, rather like lifting yourself in the hair.

Ok, what about the hangover, you may ask? Well, let me put it this way: The two qualities a site-promoter must have to avoid the hangover are patience and accuracy.

- Patience: Don't think that your submission will show up with the "reload-page-button" on your browser. It will take weeks and months for the majority of engines to spider or list you. And when they do, hopefully you have entered the correct data, and your pages are containing relevant "meta-tags" and loading correctly - otherwise - resubmit - and get the web-promotion-hangover!!

- Accuracy: To avoid errors and provide relevant data! This is most important, don't ever try to fool searchengines with tricks and spamming, it will strike back fast, and your site could be banned! That would cause the real hangover.

How do you really get your site top ranked you might ask?

If I was to pick one single item it would read: POPULARITY!

- Hrm.. What? POPULARITY? This is just what we are trying to gain by submitting to your-highness-index! You ask me to be popular without anyone knowing me???

- YES!

- But that's ridiculous, are you saying that the sites that everybody already know of and are linking to get the highest ranking??

- YES!

- I think I'm getting the-web-promotion-catch-22-hangover!

So you see, patience comes very handy again.

First see to it that people get to your site and LINK TO IT, then get better ranking and attract more visitors that link to you and then .... It's not done over night!

- Can you buy high ranking?

- Yes, some sites PROMISE you a top 10 ranking with their program, this sounds great, but what happens if they get 11 customers?

Now, I can feel you are urging me for some advice of how to get around all this, and get off the winding road and onto the highway.

OK, here are some hints:
- Write an article like this one, maybe it will get published with a link to your site as a reward. - Spend some money on advertising, there are lots of eZines (like this one) offering ads at low prices. - Join a free email list or buy a "professional" list - Join a link or banner exchange program, many of them are free. - Tell your friends (or email them), and ask them to link to your site. - Join a webring (on Yahoo you can find quite a few). - Get listed at Yahoo! This is a chapter of its own, you can read about it on my tutorial pages.
- If you have some more money, get an affiliate program for your site. - And, of course use the promotion-service on our site, it's free.

About the Author
Johan Oun, systems developer at Zicom Data responsible for the development of our site (http://www.topsitepromote.com)