A Short Tutorial on Website Submissions & Linking to your site

Author: LORDWOLF

Submitting your site to the search engines is a pain, make no mistake. But with a top twenty listing on Webcrawler alone having the capability to bring 50 visitors a day to your pages it's a pain that is worth suffering.

There are a great number of search engines around, but only the top 15 or so really generate serious traffic for most sites. Many of the lesser search engines are 'meta search' types, meaning they actually get their results from the bigger engines anyway.

Of the main engines, there are two categories - Directory based, and Spidered based. The Directory based (which includes Yahoo, Looksmart and the Open Directory Project) are generally added by hand. This means an editor for the chosen category looks at your site and awards it a position (or not) based on how he/she rated it. The Spider index types, (including Lycos, Inktomi and AltaVista) use robot browsers to check and index the sites based on pre-programmed criteria.

In general, to get a good listing in the Directory engines means you must impress the editor with the look, ease of navigation and content of your site. Make sure your first page loads very quickly (empty your browser cache before checking) as this is an important factor. If your 'front' page doesn't open within 10 - 15 seconds you will not get a high placement. If need be, create a simple 'Welcome' page that opens quickly and use it as a front door to your site with the more graphic laden pages with in it.

With Directory engines, if you have midis on your page be sure you include an ""off "" control. You will be penalized if not. Don't over do images or clutter - the editors read hundreds of these sites a day and will be likely to have a lot in the queue behind you. They want to judge your site rather than your taste in art or cartoons and music selections.

Spider based engines are more predictable. Spiders scan your pages looking for your keywords, count the number of times the keyword occurs through out that page, and measure it against the overall length of your text to calculate how relevant your site is to the keyword.

Your keywords need to be set in the keywords meta tag, and should also be included in your description, and to occur AT LEAST once in the first 200 characters of text in your page. For this reason it is wise to not try to target too many keywords on a single page, try to pick simple word-pairs. Make sure you pick phrases or words that you will repeat several times in the actual text of your page and that they describe your site to a viewer not to a robot.

For the same reasons of relevance to keywords, try to stick to one specific topic per page. If you deal with two different topics then you risk the chance of only 50% of the page being deemed relevant to either topic.

Assuming your site is now optimized to be rated by the engines you need to start submitting. There are some tricks to this too. Firstly, submitting to FFA (Free For All) Links pages is a good idea. Most spiders will place your site far more highly if they have found lots of other sites linking to you. Once you submit to any Spidered Search Engine you should add your site to as many FFA pages as you can find, once per day, for about two weeks. You will get a lot of junk mail in response to these submissions - one from each site generally, but most have exactly the same text in them so you can set your mail program to automatically delete them by using filter settings.

The best value listings of all are the Inktomi database. Those used by Yahoo, Hotbot, ICQit and many others, and the ODP (Open Directory Project) which is used by a list of Engines too long to even consider listing. Getting into the ODP database is now the only way to get listed in the AOL net search. AOL use spiders to index sites found in the ODP directory so you can see why it would be so important to be listed.

Top Five Directory Databases (1) Open Directory (2) Snap (3) Yahoo! Web Sites (Inktomi) (4) Yahoo! Directory (5) LookSmart

Normally, you will submit to these directories one time for a given web site. It is extremely important that you submit to them correctly the first time and choose the very best category. Be aware that it's often difficult to get a directory to change your listing later unless you send them a letter of explanation.

Here's where it gets complicated: Submitting to (6) HotBot (an engine) - will get you listed in all Inktomi based engines.

(7) Netscape: Netscape draws its results from Open Directory first. If no matches are found there, then it searches (8) Google. Therefore, we submit to Open Directory (a directory) and Google (an engine) to become listed on Netscape.

(9) AOL Search: AOL will search Open Directory listings first. After those matches are displayed, it will then draw results from Inktomi. Again, we submit to Open Directory using our directory guide, and to HotBot to be fully listed in AOL Search.

(10) Magellan: By submitting to Excite will get you listed here.

(11) Excite will get you listed in Magellan. They pull from each other's database.

(12) MSN: MSN draws results from LookSmart.com first, then after that, matches are displayed from (13) AltaVista. Therefore, we submit at www.looksmart.com (a directory) and to AltaVista to be found in MSN.

Additionally there are very popular Search engines to submit to that can be found on many web sites using search box's.

(14) Infoseek/Go Network (15) Lycos (16) Planet Search (17) WebCrawler (18) What-U-Seek (19) WhatsNu (20) Northern Light I hope the information given will aid you to get your sites placed in the search engines so give some thought to your keywords, check your load times, make sure your site is easy to navigate, and get submitting. To learn more about how Search engines rate sites and other tips I would recommend visiting http://www.searchenginewatch.com

---------------------------------------------- Resubmission's are just as important

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After all the hard work you've done to submit your site, don't neglect it by hoping you will stay on top - YOU WON'T! You must resubmit your site at a min of every 4 weeks. There are some great programs and sites out there that can submit your site for you so be sure to book mark at least 3 sites if you don't have sumitting software.

I use a calendar here to remind me when I am due to resubmit. But for beginners the easiest thing you can do is, submit on the 1st of every month. Your site will remain fresh in the databases and show it as a current site submission. With the information above you are armed now so you know what sites will give you the best results.

With out question you NEED to get listed in the ODP site - though the evaluator may be your competitor and my not register your site in his section, this may not be the case with other link categories that follow the the same theme. You want to be listed in as MANY categories as you can (what's the worst that can happen? They say no?) So submit to each available listing in the main category.

---------------------------- Linking to other sites ----------------------------- Who should you try to get to link to you? In simple terms, anyone and everyone. In more practical terms however, it depends on the effort and what you have to give up in return. Exchanging a banner ad on your site for a link from a high quality busy site may be extremely valuable for attracting new visitors. The banner may however, redirect your hard sought visitor to the banner site and away from yours.

Banners also tend to clutter a web page, increase the load time and distract your visitors. You can only put up a limited number and then what do you exchange?

When was the last time you cruised a link exchange site looking for somewhere interesting to go? The fact is people look for sites with search engines or by search lists and recommendations at related sites. Link exchanges will produce few if any visitors and if they do they will probably not be prime candidates for your product or service. That is not unless you have a link exchange site yourself.

Not necessarily. There is actually a growing value to having these links to your site. As previously mentioned, many search engines, especially second generation engines, are starting to use site popularity as a way to rank your site. In other words, a site with 100 links to it will rank higher in the search results than a site with only 5 or six. It is consequently important to establish links to your site both for the traffic they can generate directly and for the indirect value of improving your search engine ranking.

Although Link Exchanges may be of value, it is better to put your initial efforts into exchanging links with other related sites. Not only will they generate more visitors, the visitors they do generate will be better qualified. What about competitors? Sometimes competitors attract viewers who may not find exactly what they need. If you allow your competition to also have a link what's the harm? The idea is to attract the viewer. link pages if you have a lot of links and put any Link Exchange banners on your site. Put these at the bottom if you do decide to use them all to often these banners will hang while loading and cause the page itself to hang - most viewers will not wait long so play it safe, and put it at the bottom. This way the viewer can still see your site and then the banner later.

Joining Web Rings related to your topic if one is available or create one if not is another option available to attract viewers. With E commerce now on the rise shoppers want to find the best deals by having all the related competition in one ring it makes it easy to find what and were the best deals are. The key to using rings, is in the registration of the page - you must use the full URL address of the page that will host the banner for that ring. This is especially important if your site uses frames.

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