After you have produced amazingly worthwhile material and resources, other than getting the pages submitted to search engines, what could possibly be left? Okay, there are a few things left to do.
Start by rechecking your code, both HTML and CSS. This process of cleaning involves triple checking that all the codes are accurate and don’t report errors. Things may have changed since you started messing with the content from your first tests. Take time to review your site to consolidate, streamlining and optimizing your code so the page will load faster.
When You Are Ready – Go Public
What, even now you won’t tell me to start submitting my pages to search engines? Soon, my friend, soon. There are still a few more tests that need to be done. After all, you want your page to look its best before the search engines grab hold of it.
Start a word-of-mouth and email campaign of your own to tell all your friends, relatives, co-workers, and people on the street that you have a new web page up. Remember, word-of-mouth is still the best advertising. Tell friends and business associates that you have updated your Website and ask them if they would check it. Ask them to call or email you after checking, to let you know what they think. Be willing to accept their criticisms. Remember that your closest friends and family members, unless you have trained them otherwise, will only say nice things because that it what they are trained and expected to do. Take their comments lightly, and ask others to really tell you the truth.
Don’t take your web page design personally. The goal is to create pages that are user-friendly and easy to access, allowing everyone to enjoy reading them, not to win a “pretty” or “popularity” contest. These pages represent you and your business. If you have a cluttered web page, then people think you are a cluttered person. If your web pages are clean, easy to use, and enjoyable, users and potential clients will look upon you as someone they can work with, a true professional. Make sure they pass the professional test.
After you’ve had some people review your pages, and you’ve made more changes and revalidated, then it is time to start the search engine submission process.
Search Engine Web Page Submission
After all this work, your pages are ready and deserving of inclusion on search engines. You now understand how search engines work and what they are looking for. You understand how search (link popularity) to determine where and how they place you in their categories and rankings.
Write or type out the following information about your site and keep it handy as a reference when you submit your site manually. We’ve also provided a link to view our own Website’s reference information:
TITLE:
Oh, by the way, it’s educational, too.
On another sheet, keep track of the search engines you have submitted to, date of submission, if it was submitted manually or through site submission software or services, and the url (web page address) of the submission. If you are submitting specific pages, make a note of which page you have submitted.
Schedule your search engine submission dates in your calendar about a month or more apart. As you submit your site, check the fine print to find out how often they permit site submissions. Some search engines, specifically directories, will only allow one submission per category. Other search engines may permit your site and/or pages to be submitted no more than once a month, others no more than once every six months. More frequent submissions could result in a ban. If you are both manually submitting your site and using site submission software or services, keep a list of the search engines they are submitting to as well. This way you can control your submission overloads.
If you choose to invest in site submission software or services, take care to thoroughly check their services out first to avoid wasting your time and money. There are search engine comparison charts and partnership charts that show you the partnerships between search engines. For example, DMOZ Open Directory Project permits Google, Teoma, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, AOL Search, Altavista, and Alltheweb access to its directory. Altavista, on the other hand, gets its information from DMOZ and Overture. If you submit to Overture, odds are you will end up on a search on Altavista. If you submit to DMOZ, you could easily turn up on any searches on Google, Teoma, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, and so on. Watch overlapping your submissions to engines that use other engines to ensure your inclusion.
Remember, a search engine’s work is done by sending software called “Robots” or “Spiders” which “crawl” through the Internet looking for sites, either through links or through page submissions. Even if you haven’t submitted your Website to a search engine, if it has been up for a while, someone might link to it and a robot or spider crawling through their page would find a link to your page and, presto, you are on a search engine. The robots and spiders gather information for their database, running through a sophisticated filtering and sifting process before adding you to their database. At any time, bad coding, abusive use of trigger a denial, so spending the extra time to make sure you have done the best job possible can make a difference. You never know when your site is being scanned or crawled, so always make sure you have your “best face showing”.
Different search engines refresh their database with new information at different rates. Some search engines have several spiders working simultaneous, others occasionally. The web is now so big, it can take six months for a single spider to crawl through all the pages they do find. Google promotes that they have searched over three million pages, but in reality, they have only put a million or more of those pages into their database. It is just too much information to process quickly. As search engines get more sophisticated, they will process the data faster, but unfortunately people are adding pages to the web at a rate faster than they can keep up. Over 50 million new or changed pages are posted every day.
I don’t know about you, but I really love Walmart. Living overseas and going from shop to shop for hours on end is totally exhausting. Arriving in the US, one stop at Walmart (or its equivalent do-all store) is glorious. I can get what I want all in one place and spent less time driving around hunting for things. I can get on with the purpose of my visit – spend time with friends and family and not out shopping.
So imagine my delight in finding a single site dedicated to submitting your site to search engines of all different shapes and sizes, but one that doesn’t mess around with all the details and mess. And best of all, for the most part, the service is FREE. That’s right. FREE.
I know there seems to always be a gimmick, but Robert Woodhead is an admitted computer geek and mastermind behind a lot of gaming software and Websites. Like you and I, he got tired of all the fuss and hype of Website submissions to search engines and all the various directories and indexes, so he created Selfpromotion.com, an automatic site submission web page that takes you step-by-step through a very easy and short and sweet process to submit your web site to thousands of search engines, indexes, catalogues, directories, and even foreign language search engines and Website award sites. Amazing. And this is all for FREE!
I’ve used his services for a couple of years now, and I finally paid for it through his “pay-for-it-if-you-like-it” shareware attitude. It has paid off tremendously.
I know this sounds like an info-commerical, but it is our goal to bring you helpful information to help you learn from our mistakes and time wasters. This works. The process is spelled out step-by-step on the site, which isn’t designed for pretty but for facts. Read EVERYTHING as it is all incredibly useful information. He lists all kinds of information about the search engines and gives recommendations on whether you should submit or not. For instance, Altavista is now owned and run by Yahoo, so if you submit to Yahoo, why waste your time with Altavista. You’ll be there soon anyway. For the sites that don’t take automatic submissions or require payment, he lists those individually with comments and recommendations and links to their home pages and submission pages, so you can do this on your own without a lot of hunting and pecking. He lists thousands of places to promote your web page. Everything made simple and easy.
Our sites are now included in Chinese search engines and other foreign search engines and on indexes and directories that we would have taken months to discover. So for free, this is worth it. For a small fee, he adds on some other humdinger submission tools.
So if you have a website you want to promote, check out SelfPromotion.com. It’s a resource for do-it-yourselfers where you can learn to prepare your pages for the search engines, then use a sophisticated url submission robot to submit your webpages to all the important search engines and directories. You’ll also find tutorials about website promotion, submitting to yahoo, and much more. Best of all, you can use the site for free — if you like it, pay what YOU think it’s worth! The guy who runs it has reinvented tipping! What do you have to lose?
Our Listings of Top Search Engines
- Search Engines: Top Search Engines Listing
- Search Engines: Directories and Indexes
- Search Engines: Specialty Search Engines and Directories
- A Winner: Awards for Websites
Site Submissions – To Directories – Free
- Yahoo’s Site Submission
- Altavista’s Submission Page
- Alltheweb.com’s Site Submission
- Open Source Directory (Submit by specific category) *****
Site Submissions – Services – Free
- Enginemage’s Free Search Engine Site Submissions
- Excellent Free Website Submission at Selfpromotion.com *****
- Ineedhits.com Free Site Submission
- Scrubtheweb.com
- Submit Corner’s Site Submission
- Submit-it.com
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