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/products/pricing/default.htm

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

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

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

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

Search Engines:
Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, AOL Search.

Directories:
Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org)
http://www.worldsiteindex.com
http://www.webworldindex.com
http://www.searchsight.com

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


J. M. Stevens is contributing editor at 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.

Using Your Keywords In Page Titles

It is strongly recommended that you make use of keywords in the page titles themselves. This title tag can be different from a Meta tag, but it is truly worth considering in relation to them. Whatever text one chooses to place in the title tag (between the and portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they decide to view the web page. Some browsers can also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text that you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine might decide to rank your web page. Additionally, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just as a single Home Page, you must always bear in mind that each page of your website must be well optimized for the search engines. The title of each page i.e. the keywords that you use on that page and the phrases that you use in the content will consequently draw traffic to your site.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will hopefully draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so always make sure that you capture all the keywords and phrases that you need for each product, service or information page.

One of the most common mistakes made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, whilst you want your business name in the title of the home page, it will probably be a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. So why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display even closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating the first three positions for keywords in the title whilst avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is most crucial in search engine optimization.


Michael Beattie is contributing editor at 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.