Submitting to search engines

Search engines are one of the most important ways to gain traffic. Altavista, Google, FAST, Lycos and many others receive more hits than you and I can ever even dream to. This part of the APG site is built to help you in capturing a small part of the huge audience that uses search engines every day. This can be achieved by submitting to them and by making sure your pages perform well in the index once they have been submitted.

Because there are so many different search engines and because the algorithms that they use to rank sites are very complex, it is impossible to discuss every single detail in one article. That is why this section is divided into multiple articles. Each of those articles is like a small piece of a big machine. While the parts are not useless on their own, you must put them together if you want the machine to work. Link popularity, Meta tags, Choosing keywords.. knowledge in any of them will help you, but knowledge in all of them will bring better results.

As you now understand the layout of the site, let's start understanding the search engines and get our hands dirty. This article explains the process of submitting your site to the search engines. Read the other articles on this section for instructions on how to prepare your pages for the submission.

Where to submit and how?

Before submitting, you must of course find a place to submit to. I would recommend that you focus on submitting to the search engines listed here, as they are capable of providing you with serious traffic. It is my experience that these big engines provide the most visitors compared to the time spent on optimizing the pages and submitting them.

This doesn't mean that you should completely ignore the smaller engines that aren't mentioned in that article, but it does mean that you should focus on the big ones. If you can make it in just one or two of the major search engines, the traffic you'll receive will in most cases surpass that of 20 minor engines put together.

I've handled this matter by hand-submitting to the big engines and by using a tool such as Selfpromotion to submit to the smaller engines. Submitting to them via an automated tool is in my opinion a cost-effective move in terms of traffic received/time spent, but after that I just forget about the smaller search engines. I don't monitor my rankings in them and neither do I try to optimize my pages to please their algorithms, as I feel that the time required in order to do so is better spent on further studying the major engines.

My relationship with the big engines is completely different from the one I have with the small ones. After I've submitted, I keep an eye on my rankings in the big engines and try to continuously tweak my pages so that they would appear closer to the top in the search results. If my site drops or rises just a little in ranking for an important keyword, I can immediately see the change in the amount of visitors I receive.

Thus, with the major search engines, the game doesn't stop when you submit - that's when it starts! You can gain traffic just by submitting your pages to all of the engines and then forgetting about them, but it is nothing compared to what you can achieve if you optimize your pages and continuously change them to match any changes in the algorithm.

Submitting all pages vs. submitting just one page

A question that is often asked in the Usenet newsgroups and various discussion forums is "Should I submit just one of my pages, or all of them?". The answer to that question is: It depends on where you're submitting to. If you're submitting to website directories, you should usually only submit your home page and nothing else. But if your are targeting the search engines and as you're reading this, you probably are, the answer is: Submit all of your pages.

In the good old days, you could just submit your home page and the search engines would follow the links on that page & automatically register the rest of the pages on your site. However, things have changed and you now have to submit all of the pages you want to have included in the search engine's index. As having more pages in the database increases the chances of your site coming up, the only way to succeed is to grab a cup of coffee and start feeding the pages to the search engines one by one... Google and FAST are positive exceptions to this rule, as they still follow links aggressively. If you're submitting to these two, it's usually enough to only register your home page with both of them as they will automatically follow the links on it and index the other pages.

When you're submitting the individual pages to different engines, try to register a maximum of five per day per engine. You probably won't get hurt if you exceed that number, but as submitting very large numbers of pages in the course of one day might give your site unwanted attention or cause the search engine to drop some of your submissions, it is better to just stick with the '5 per day per engine' rule, unless your site is really big.

I've submitted, how do I know my pages are there?

Search for them. You can usually find your pages by entering "URL:yourpageslocationhere" (w/o the quotes) into the search field, sometimes just "yourpageslocationhere" is enough. Some engines don't support these methods, but offer a Power Search/Advanced Search feature that allows you to look for pages located in a specific domain.

If you can't find your pages, it might be that they are not included in the index. If that is the situation, don't panic. It always takes the search engine a while to index content after it has been submitted, so be patient. Don't resubmit the pages unless it has been about three weeks since you submitted and you still can't find them in the database.

In some cases, the pages have not been indexed because their design or filetype is incompatible with the search engine. If you fear that this might be the case, read "Building search engine friendly sites" from this site.

When should I resubmit to search engines?

When there's a need to do so. Some people say that you should resubmit every two weeks or every month. I say to you - don't listen to them. Resubmitting just for the sake of doing it does usually more harm than good. Some search engines appear to slightly prefer older pages over brand new pages, so by resubmitting when you really have no need to do so, you're wasting your time and perhaps even damaging your ranking.

You should only resubmit if:

• The page has disappeared from the database or never appeared there in the first place.
  
• Your rankings have dropped/are low and you have made some changes to the page that you think will boost your ranking. In this case, it is recommended that you resubmit in order to make the search engine 'see' the changes you've made.

Don't be afraid of resubmitting your pages if you have to, but don't do it just because it's possible.

If you've read everything written above, you should now have a pretty good idea on how to submit your pages to different search engines. However, before you start submitting, remember to acquire some knowledge about search engine optimization and use it to prepare your pages first!