Website Promotion
Search Engine Submission
Google is not the only search engine around, millions of people arrive at websites every day via a search engine. Getting your website listed in the major search engines will greatly increase your traffic.
Getting there
The first thing to remember about all of the major search engines, google, yahoo, lycos etc is that you cannot just submit your url and expect it to be instantly listed, it takes a little work, but the first step is to make an initial submission.
Most of the major free search engines allow you to submit your own url, below are some links that allow you to do that.
- Altavista - www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
- Google - www.google.com/addurl.html
- Yahoo - www.docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest
Each of the search engines has their own method of handling submissions.
Altavista will generally list most sites that are submitted, normally after about 7-10 days
Google will add all submissions to a list for their search engine spiders to crawl, submitting to google does not guarantee your site will be listed, there's a great number of other things to consider, which we'll look at in a moment.
Yahoo will actually review each submission manually and providing your site doesn't violate any of the terms noted on it's submission page, your website will normally be listed at somepoint, although it may take sometime.
Preparing your site
As i mentioned, submitting your website to search engines like google is really only the first step. The placing of your website will greatly depend on a number of other factors, so what can you do to ensure you don't get ignored?
Incoming Links
Your position on some of the top search engines will be greatly affected by the number of other sites linking to your own. The more people and pages linking to your website the better, especially if those pages have a good search engine position themselves, so the first thing you can do is make sure you take every opportunity to get your link added to other websites.
Asking friends to add your link to their site, promoting your url in signatures on forums and message boards if you use them, adding your link to signatures in your email are all simple but effective ways to improve your chances of getting a better listing, buy improving the amount of links pointing to your website.
Your Page Title
This is another important factor for search engines like google when ranking your website, your page title, the content between the
Many people fail to make proper use of their title tag, often it's just overlooked but it's as important as any other factors on your page in regards to search engine position.
For example, lets say you run a business called Bob's Computers, selling computer games and accesories.
Having your title as "Bob's Computers" is not going to be anywhere near as effective as something like "Bob's Computer Games and Accessories" when your site is being ranked by the search engine robots, making good use of your title content in this way will also help later on when people are searching for the services you offer.
Use of Meta Tags
There's a number of meta tags that can be used for different reasons inside your pages, the most important tags to consider when preparing your site for search engines are the "content" and "keyword" tags.
This is how many of the search engines define what searches and keywords will trigger your link to be displayed, but also have an important part to play in getting listed in the first place.
A good reference page for learning more about the general use of meta tags can be found at http://www.philb.com/metatag.htm and there's also several sites that will help you to generate the meta tags for use in your pages, one example being http://www.submitter.net/meta-tag-generator.asp
Your "keywords" tag should include as many words as possibile that relate to the content on your site, you should never "generalise" keywords. For example, if you're selling computer accessories then "computer accessories" is not a great thing to use, be more specific, and list the individual products or services that you offer.
DO NOT spam your keywords, by spamming i mean multiple use of the same words inside your meta tags, it will not improve your search engine rating for that term, but instead most likley mean your site is never even listed.
Things to avoid
As tempting as it may be to try and "trick" the search engines into giving your page a better ranking, they are very wise to most things and will not hesitate to punish people for attempting such things as, making duplicate copies of the same page, hiding a "list" of their keywords in pages by having the text the same colour as the background, or submitting sites multiple times over a short period.
It's really not worth trying to trick the search engines like this or in any other way, you'll only loose out in the end.