Site Submission Services

By Richard Lowe
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004

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.