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Submitting Your Site To the Search Engines
There is no question but that a good search engine placement strategy is hands down the least costly promotion method you can use to draw highly targeted traffic to your site. It's common knowledge that search engines, properly used, can contribute 80 - 90% of a Website's traffic. But developing an effective positioning strategy requires a significant investment of time. It takes more time to implement the strategy, and more time still to continuously update the strategy as search engine indexing parameters keep changing. What I'm saying is that if you're determined to get and maintain a top listing, you must find tools and techniques that work; use them until they don't work anymore, and then re-develop them. If you're gung ho to do this, great! It's by far your best bet long term for driving a steady stream of targeted, motivated traffic to your site. Just bear in mind that all the time you are taking for this exercise is time taken away from other promotional efforts that might prove more effective in the short term.
Registering Your Website When you register with a search engine, you generally provide the URL to your homepage. Most search engines can use this single URL to find all the other pages at your site, provided they're inter-linked. However, to be on the safe side (if permitted) you should also register the URLS to the top-level pages on your site. Because submitting your pages to search engines and directories is such an important business - as well as a costly one nowadays - it is critical that you can answer "yes" to each of the following questions before you begin the process.
If you can answer "yes" to all of the above - AND you've optimized your pages with keywords and META tags to the best of your ability - then you're ready to submit. Should you have any doubts as to the importance of registering with the search engines, check out Sumantra Roy's short article on the Importance of Search Engine Positioning.
Multi-Site Submission Services Submission service sites abound on the Web and most offer to do virtually the same thing: submit your site to thousands of search engines, directories and link sites. And they all carry out this task fairly competently. (Proof of this will be the hundreds of e-mails flooding your mailbox from every service but the top ones, who probably didn't accept the submission in the first place). Just don't expect to to get a corresponding flood of traffic as a result of these submissions (unless the uniqueness or quality of your site merits a top ranking, or your site is more relevant than all others under a specific keyword you have listed.) Fact is, the extra 50 or 5000 sites that you register with using these multi-site services is merely icing on the cake. You may well be listed somewhere or other in lots of Web databases, but the odds of these lesser services driving a lot of traffic to your site are slim. In this age of link popularity, it certainly doesn't hurt to spread the word about your Website as far and wide as you can spread it, and URL submission services provide a quick and efficient way of doing this. But don't belabor the point. Simply pick a service from the many available and get on with it. If you're looking for quick and easy, you're probably better off using search engine submission software. The primary advantage of using software over a service is that you avoid monthly fees - and you can submit as many URLs as often as you like, for no additional cost.
Sites That Go the Extra Mile to Ensure Top Ranking Bear in mind, getting submitted is not the same as getting placed. If you want to get placed, you've got to spend some money and go with a service that will take the time to make sure your Web pages are properly optimized to garner you a top listing - the only kind of listing that really matters if you want to drive lots of targeted traffic to your site. The best of these services do not come cheap, but in this instance, you definitely get what you pay for. And no other means of publicizing your Website will pay off more than optimized search engine positioning! According to a survey by the Georgia Institute of Technology, 86% of all web surfers visit sites as a result of search engine searches. So, although the cost might seem excessively high when you first take a look at some of these services, after you've been online for awhile and have come to appreciate the TRUE VALUE involved in SE OPTIMIZATION DONE RIGHT, you will actually come to regard the fees these folks charge as a bargain! Here is a short list of some of the best placement services the 'Net has to offer:
As most of us learn the hard way, although the internet offers a wide variety of advertising venues, making the best use of these venues takes considerable time and effort and the results are not always what you hope for, which brings us to the question of whether or not you should pay for specialized help in promoting your website. To quote Magic City's Bob Massa, one of the Net's premier authorities on website advertising & search engine placement, on this subject: "Without setting your goals and developing a plan, you will be simply chasing traffic and never even know when you found it. Once you have your plan, you can better determine whether or not you need need specialized help. There aren't many "free" engines to submit to and there are very few "free" places to advertise. You can easily find yourself spending far more on mistakes than you would on a qualified professional. Remember the old saying, we pay for our mistakes? Well, that is true and the fewer mistakes you make, the greater the opportunity for success."
Monitor
Your Submissions and Rankings
Any results not in top 50 suggest your site has not yet been
added to the search engine's database yet. The Wave of the Future - Search Engine Trends Trend #1: Link popularity is becoming increasingly important. First and foremost you should have links from your homepage to every other page within your web site and to every other site that you want spidered. You should, of course, have links, appropriately titled, back into your site as well. In other words, if your site is about web design, it would be a mistake to have an incoming link look like this: <a href="http://www.designingyourweb.com">Click here</a> to learn the basics of good web design. Such a link would lead the search engines, especially Google, to believe your site was about "click here" (uh oh!) Better to have an incoming link look like this: Click here to learn the basics of good <a href="http://www.designingyourweb.com">Web Design</a> Also make sure you have links to your site from relevant directories, and link your site back to those directories and other portal sites, search engines, and other leading sites in your niche. It's important to the crawlers that your site explode into millions of links, all within a few mouse clicks. (With search engine technology now relying more and more on link popularity, search engine crawlers now simply follow link after link.) TIP: You can control your web site's reputation or theme by setting up several small related sites and using hypertext links to cross link them all together. The trick is to pick two or three keywords that describe the theme of the destination site. Always use those exact same words when linking to the destination site from any other site you control. Trend #2: Pay-per-click or Pay-for-rank search engines are the wave of the future. Want your web site to achieve a "Top 10" placement on a major search engine as soon as tomorrow? No problem! Pay-per-click search engines offer anyone with a web site the opportunity to obtain and keep a top spot in the search engines - no optimization required - provided you have the funding. Here's a short history of the Pay for Rank craze. It all began back in 1998, when GoTo launched its groundbreaking pay-for-performance search technology. Now re-branded as Overture, it has spawned dozens of pay-per-click clones, all attempting to cash in on the 'Dutch auction' highest bidder takes the spoils business model. Trend #3: Consolidation of Search Services
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