Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant percentage of your business is done on the internet through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No quantity of press releases, newspaper or radio ads, banner ads, junk e-mail or newsletters will accomplish the equivalent results, although, they maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but merely false promises. The clearest way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right keywords, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Do not submit websites that are incomplete. When submitting to a search engine, make certain to provide information about your website, keywords and any additional information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business. I know this sounds obvious but people do forget to do this thus causing their site to be rejected.

Mere submission to search engine companies doesn’t guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites going up daily it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember when submitting a site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots (webots or crawlers). Search engines like google.com hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that act as search engine submission services. You can decide to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one:

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Just don’t use the automatic submission services.

Here 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

Aside from the above there are literally thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website. The sites mentioned above constitute probably the most popular ones and consequently the most important. The following links gives information on other search engines and directories:

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

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

The important thing to realise is that without submitting your site to the search engines you will find it difficult to get traffic which is the life blood of any online business.