Website Submission - A SEO Specialist Shares His Secrets
by Robert Fuess
Published on this site: January 13th, 2006 - See
more articles from this month
Many of you have heard of submitting your website, but what
does this really mean? What places should you really submit
your website? What about submitting to thousands of search
engines and directories through some website promotion service?
What Pages to Submit:
At the minimum, you should submit your home page. Many search
engines will promise to find and crawl the rest of your website
automatically (in their own good time). But if they don't
discourage you from doing so, I would submit several of the
important pages in your site. For example, a site map is definitely
something I would want to submit, since it should have direct
links to the rest of your website.
Also, if I get another webmaster to link to my website, it
I like to submit that page as well. I want the search engines
to recognize that this resource has changed - it has a link
to my website and I want the credit for it.
What to Prepare:
For the search engines, I would make sure that the website
is properly optimized. At a minimum, I would do a double check
the meta-tags to ensure that the title, meta-description and
meta- keywords properly describe the web pages and have some
of my desired keywords in it. I would also run a website validator
on the pages I intend on submitting - to keep the search engine
spiders from choking on my website. (http://validator.w3.org/)
For more information on optimizing a website for the search
engines, go to
http://website-optimization-2.blogspot.com/
For the directories, I would normally prepare some commonly
requested information. This really helps to speed up the process.
I normally use a generic text editor like Microsoft Notepad
and save the following data before I go and submit to the
different search engines and directories. This enables me
to use copy and paste.
This should have:
- Your email
- Your website url
- A good title for your website
- A description for the website
Since Yahoo will allow you to submit a list of URLS that
are in a text document (or an RSS feed) I would encourage
you to prepare one to help them out. These should be at the
root directory of your website and be updated whenever there
is a change to your pages. That way you can just submit the
location of the RSS feed or the text file and let Yahoo use
that to find the rest of your pages. It is a nice time saver.
Personally, I like using an automated RSS feed since Yahoo
can use it to determine when the last changes occurred and
decide what pages to re-crawl first.
If you don't know what RSS is, here is a great article on
it:
http://feedvalidator.org/docs/rss2.html
Google uses a similar technology to help it find all of your
web pages. It is called a "Google Site Map". That
is the subject of another article. I wrote one that has a
lot more info on the Google Site Maps
http://www.spiderweblogic.com/GoogleSitemap.aspx
, for when you are ready to build one. Google also has a special
way to submit these. Just follow their instructions. If this
is too complicated, contact a webmaster or a SEO specialist
who is familiar with this feature.
Where to Submit:
I would recommend submitting your home page to the major
search engines individually, at least initially. However,
there are several services that do groups of them for you
- and is a big time saver for the rest of your site. The following
is one of my favorites: http://www.freewebsubmission.com/
I have always deselected Google, though, since I submit to
them manually through the Google website. I submit my web
pages to the following search engines manually (without a
special tool) just to ensure that it is done.
You will need a Yahoo account to submit to the Yahoo search
engine. And don't fret if you don't see immediate results.
Your site should normally exist in MSN within about 6 weeks,
in Yahoo in 8-12 weeks, and in Google within about 3 months.
(You will not likely get much search results from Google for
the first year though - but hold out and keep working on the other tricks.
In the long run, Google will normally give you about 60 -
70% of the search engine traffic if you follow these methods.)
Also, if you have the Alexa toolbar ( http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi?p=
) installed, navigate to your website and click on the "info"
button on the toolbar. Then you will have to fill in information
about your website. Once this is registered, you will start
seeing how your website's Alexa rating looks. There has been
some rumors that Google considers the Alexa description in
its searches - so make sure it is relevant to your website
as a whole and has at least one of your keywords.
You should also submit your website to DMOZ http://www.dmoz.com/add.html
. This is a massive directory that is republished in several
other websites. It is managed by humans, and is therefore
considered to be of special relevance by other search engines.
I strongly recommend reading all their rules before submitting
- and follow them closely. Make sure that you try to get listed
in only one category - the most relevant one for your business. It can take a month or two to get listed,
but it really helps with your backlinks and overall relevancy
as a website.
After DMOZ, here are the most important list of directories
to be listed in.
If you haven't used directories before - try browsing these
before you fill out the form to submit your site. They are
organized by category. You need to find the most relevant
category to put your website before you start to fill out
the form for each of these. Have a pen and paper as you browse
- and write down directory paths of where you want to be.
Being in some directories just adds some good backlinks.
(When another webmaster links to your website, this is considered
a backlink.) Others, like Yahoo and DMOZ, tend to get some
special relevance to certain search engines. After you get
familiar with these well-known directories, look for niche
directories that are specific to the type of business your
website is about.
There are specialized directories that focus on a particular
category of links. These can be valuable - you will just have
to do a bit of searching to find them. These may be considered
as part of your overall strategy.
Being listed in a search engine there doesn't guarantee that
you will have a good ranking - this is just the first step
- letting them know that you exist.
If You See an Offer to Get Listed in Hundreds of Directories
and Websites Automatically - Beware! Many of these will list
you in hundreds of FFA (free for all) sites. These sites are
considered Spam by search engines and I would strongly encourage
you to avoid them. Did I mention to avoid these? Check out
what Google has to say about these: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
. They may get you quick backlinks, but they are from the
"wrong" type of site. These are just a list of sites
- and they stay there temporarily. Only the latest 100 submitted
or so are displayed there and you need to be resubmitted regularly
to stay there. Few humans use this - it is just a linking
game to trick the search engines about your popularity (and
search engines don't like it). Don't bother.
To Wrap it Up:
Get backlinks - but avoid FFA sites. There are some important
directories, but being listed in "Thousands of Websites
and Directories" is likely a promotional trick to get
you listed in FFA sites. The most important backlinks are
from web pages with content related to your website and those
that your customers visit. If it isn't likely to draw your
customers, it may not be very important for your website traffic.
Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes
in making dynamic search engine optimized websites. http://www.SpiderwebLogic.com
http://www.SchoolAndTeacher.com
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