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Search Engine Submission - getting listed on the search engines

Search Engines Submission

Getting your site listed by search engines is very important.
There are different ways of doing this:

(a) Using a multi-submit form to sumbit to more than one engine at a time
(b) Do each search engine submission one by one by hand.
(c) Pay a company to submit your site.

First things First - a quick FAQ

Q: What is a search engine and what is a directory?

A:
A search engine has three parts:

A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that goes to every page or representative pages on every Web site that wants to be searchable and reads it, using hypertext links on each page to discover and read a site's other pages

A program that creates a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") from the pages that have been read

A program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you

An alternative to using a search engine is to explore a structured directory of topics. Yahoo, which also lets you use its search engine, is the most widely-used directory on the Web. A number of Web portal sites offer both the search engine and directory approaches to finding information.

Info taken from http://whatis.techtarget.com/ - a great place to get IT definitions and explanations

Q: How do search engines know how to categorise my site?

A: keywords and metatags and content!

Q Which method is best?

A: Submitting by hand is best.

Submitting by hand

Before you submit your site make sure that it and you are ready.
Firstly check that you've included a page title, sub headings, good content using lots of your keywords, a good description in your metatags, a good list of keywords in your metatags...

Metatags appear in the <head> </head> section of the web page, as does the <title> </title>.

<meta name ="keywords" content =" your keywords here">
<meta name ="description" content ="page description here">

A handy hint - speed up search engine submission

When manually submitting to different search engines, you should open a file in your word processor (or Windows Notepad) that will contain your

webpage titles,
URL,
keywords,
a short 10 word description,
a longer 25 word description and
a 50 word description of your business.
Also, consider including the following as many submission forms will ask for these:
your company name,
address,
email address, and
phone/fax number

By cutting and pasting these into the different fields in the submission forms, it will not only save you heaps of time, but will eliminate grammatical and spelling errors that can occur by typing into the submission fields for every search engine.
If as you go through search engines request other information, put this in your text file too.

Once you've submitted you should check your ranking to see how efficient your work has been. Try CGISpy Promotion Section