Your Website Submissions to the Search Engines

If you have a business which is web-based or if a significant portion of your business is carried out through your site, then one of the best advertising and marketing strategies would be to submit it to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ads, banner ads, spam email or newsletters will ever achieve the same results, although they might be effective in a small proportion.

Try to beware of companies that tend to promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which might only be false promises. The best means to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, through contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines, try to ensure that your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality by using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and all the relevant content. Don’t submit websites which might be incomplete. When submitting to a search engine, try to make sure that you provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that might be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies doesn’t guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and that the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up each day and it might take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to bear in mind whilst submitting your site is to include a site map of your website which will make the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines such as ‘http://www.google.com’ will hardly consider submissions without sitemaps.

There are several online companies that will accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service such as the one below:

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifsearch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1

Or if you want some professional help, you can try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html Don’t use the automatic submission services.

Below is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:

Search Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
Google, HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler

Directories
AOL Search Inktomi
Lycos Open Directory
MSN, Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are also thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links will give you info on other search engines and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

About the Author:
J.M. Stevens is contributing editor at http://www.webdesignarticles.net/. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.