Myths About Search Engine Submission
To submit or not to submit...
I'll be honest...I do submit...but only to my
wife's demands.
Submitting your website to the major search
engines was, at one time, the thing to do...then
came the "submission fees". It started
with Yahoo charging to submit to their directory
(with no guarantee that you would get in) and
many others soon followed. In those days, if you
were not in the Yahoo directory you had little
chance of being anywhere else.
Thankfully things have changed. Submitting
your site is really no longer necessary. In
fact, we don't even suggest that you try. We
have talked to customers that have used a search
engine submission company and the only results
was a LOT of junk email. Traffic did go up
temporarily...sales didn't. We say never use
a search engine submission company. If you
are going to submit...do it manually and only
with the primary search engines.
The purpose of submitting your web site is to
get it indexed by the search engines. Following
are a few techniques that will help.
If your website is new you will want to
submit it to DMOZ (www.dmoz.org)
as a start. Unfortunately we have had a number
of customers say that they have submitted
their site to DMOZ with no results after
months. DMOZ submissions are reviewed by live
people who volunteer for the job. In highly
competitive areas these people are covered up
with submissions and it can take some time to
get listed. But it's still worth the effort.
If you have an existing website make sure
you make changes to your site on a regular
basis...at least every week. The major spiders
appear to visit a site more often if it
changes often.
Find yourself a high ranking website (we
prefer a high google ranking) and have them
link to your web site. Our experience is that
this works almost as well as submitting your
site.
Watch your stats to find out when the main
search engine spiders visit. The two most
important are Googlebot and Inktomi. Many of
our sites change daily and in some cases are
visited by these two spiders several times a
week. We have noticed that it can take up to 8
weeks for changes to make it to the index.
Change your content on a regular basis.
Do not leave broken links on your
site...even for a day.
Make sure your hosting company is fast and
consistent. If your site responds slowly,
spiders may think the site no longer exists.
The most important part of getting your site
in the search engines is having the site
designed to be attractive to the spiders. We
will discuss that next.
Designing
for Improved Search Engine Placement
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