Search Engine Submissions
Taking the Mystery out of Search Engine Submissions
By Chris Hunter
We've been researching this topic for years and years and just like everything on the Internet, it has changed radically in the past five years. But we have done our best to keep on top of this research and in response, we want to pass some of the knowledge that we've gained in this process off to you. In this article, we will try to take the mystery out of search engines and how you can easily gain a top spot on them.
Search engines are the defining promotion for websites on the Internet. If your website has been on the Internet for longer than a year and you aren’t listed on Google, Yahoo or MSN then you can just pack up your bags and shut down your website. Ok that’s an exaggeration, but it’s almost true. If you aren’t listed, it just means that there are no links to your website at all and that you haven’t manually submitted your website to any search engines.
This is a fatal flaw. You see, search engines are to websites like the phone book is to businesses. You must be listed there. If people can’t do a search by your website’s name and find you, then people can’t find you, period! It’s as simple as that.
Now there are many ways to get listed on search engines. You can do a search for “search engine optimization” or “search engine submission” on Google (the number one search engine in the world) and see that it returns almost a million results! Wow, I don’t know about you, but that would just take too long to read through just the results! To me, time is money so I’d rather have someone tell me what works and what doesn’t!
Well that’s what this article is about! First you need to know how search engines work. I won’t get into the technical details, but give you a basic overview.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines are the lifeblood of the Internet. Without search engines, there would be no way to find anything with the billions upon billions of websites and pages. Fact: Google now claims that it has searched and indexed 3.3 billion websites.
Search engines used to be manually updated by people. The problem was, the search engines weren’t making any money because of all of the overhead this created. This, coupled with the fact that the Internet was growing at an unbelievable rate proved that no search engine could live this way.
So a couple of graduate students from Stanford University came up with some software that automated all of this and started their own search engine that has revolutionized the search engine industry. This search engine is named Google and its search technology now drives some of the most popular search engines of the world.
What this means is that the software (and not people) now searches and categorizes the billions and billions of websites on the Internet automatically. So if you follow the rules and specifications of the search engine software, then there is a high probability of getting placed high in the search engines.
Rules, Rules
So what all of this means is that you absolutely must follow the rules placed by the search engine software. If you do, then your website will most likely be placed high.
Now there are literally hundreds if not thousands of rules you must follow and keeping up with these can be a bother because they can change on a daily basis. That’s where software comes in handy. We use some software that helps us optimize our text for the search engines as well as keeps us within the rules for when we submit the website to the search engines. This comes in very handy and I wouldn’t recommend trying to do any of this by hand at all.
Submission
You can submit your websites’ URL (Uniform Resource Location) to the search engine you would like by going to the search engine home page and finding their submission tool. This can be time consuming the first time you do this. For instance, for Yahoo, you can go to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ to read how to submit to them.
I don’t recommend manual submission at all. There are just too many things that can go wrong such as submitting your website too many times or submitting the wrong web page (Google only wants your index page). If you are going to submit your website yourself (hint, hint… this is a service we can provide for you), then we recommend buying a couple of software packages and learning them very well. The first software package we recommend is Addweb Professional. This is the software we use to analyze our web pages for keywords and submit to the search engines. You can also see how your site is doing in the search engines with the ranking tool.
The second software package is really an online tool we use called Word Tracker. This tool helps you find keywords that are commonly searched for, but aren’t used by very many websites. This helps you find a niche in the keywords that will increase your chances of getting listed high in the search engines.
Gaining a Top Spot
Your goal, or any website's goal for that matter, should be to gain a top position on the search engines. This basically means being ranked within the top 10 for your targeted search engine terms.
You really should limit each page that you optimize to one or two search engine terms. The best way to narrow this down is to look at your web server log files or to use a statistical analyzer like Webalizer (free by the way) to analyze your log files. This way, you can narrow down your choices and see exactly what kind of search engine terms are being used by your visitors to find your website.
After you narrow down the search engine terms, you can start optimizing your content for the search engines. Now I'll say this once... "Content is King on the Internet." That's right. If you don't have any kind of content, you will never gain a top position on any search engine. So please consider adding content to your website.
Now, your content should have at least a couple of your search engine terms added in every paragraph or so. There is a science to it and I really need to emphasize that you should use Addweb for this, because it will let you know the latest search engine rules (see Rules, Rules above) so that you won't have too many search engine terms or too few. But as a general rule of thumb, you can just add your terms every once in a while and you should be ok. You should also have the terms in the title to your page and in the headings.
Conclusion
That's about it for this article, but because there is almost an infinite amount of information about search engines and search engine optimization, I’ve compiled a list of sites that we frequent to do research. Here they are:
http://spider-food.net
http://www.searchengineworld.com
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
http://www.searchengines.com
http://www.seochat.com
Also keep in mind that we've been researching this topic for several years and we can help you with a Search Engine Optimization campaign. Just give us a call at 979.696.2500 or use our online contact form.
Thank you!Chris Hunter