Registering a site with search engines

Search engines are one of the most important ways to gain traffic. Altavista, Go, Excite, Lycos and many many others receive more hits than you and I can ever dream of.

In order for people to find your site, you will need to register with all of the major search engines, and if you have the time, with the lesser known engines. I recommend and prefer to do the major search engines manually by visiting them and adding your URL's from their menu, but if you cannot spare the time, you could use SelfPromotion, a web-based utility that makes registering your site both easy and fast. I use it to register with the smaller engines and directories that aren't as important in generating traffic as the big ones.

Usually, it is a good idea to submit every one of your pages individually to each search engine (five per day per engine is a good rule of thumb, unless your site is very big), because most engines don't add all of your pages unless you submit them individually. At least Google is an exception to this rule; they can normally grab your entire site even if you just submit your front page. You should usually submit only your front page to directories, so if you're going to use SelfPromotion or a similar tool in submitting your site to search engines and directories, be careful.

But it's not enough to just register your site. Just by doing that, you'll get some hits, but to gain a real traffic flow, you'll need make your site search engine friendly. This is important because when a user searches for something, search engines use certain rules to figure out which sites match the user's desires. The closer the site matches the query, the higher it is on the result list. And being high on that list is extremely important, because if the first sites on the list seem suitable, the user visits them and never even sees the ones at the bottom.

The rules used in this process are extremely complex, vary depending on the search engine used and are changed often, but there are some basics that apply to nearly every engine. Check out the Choosing keywords section for a quick look into the subject.