Submitting your Site to Search Engines

Once your website has been optimized it is ready to submit. The important search engines to be listed on include:

• Google
  http://www.google.com/addurl.html 
• Altavista
  http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl
• HotBot
  http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
• Lycos
  http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html
• Alltheweb
  http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

New, and potentially important, search engines include: 

• Wisenut
  http://www.wisenut.com
• Teoma 
  http://www.teoma.com
  Teoma are owned by Ask Jeeves so are likely to be important. They have no submission page but are spidering the web and doing so very effectively. If you are listed elsewhere you are probably there already.

Manual submissions are more effective than auto submits. Be very cautious in particular about using free submissions utilities that submit your site to hundreds or even thousands of site - you are more likely to generate a deluge of spam than any useful traffic.

What Happens after Submission?

Once your website has been submitted it will be visited by the search engine robot. This software will visit your site and "spider" it, basically crawling through the HTML of the site to obtain information about the nature of the content.

The content of the title is important to most search engines, the meta tags important to some but not all. Some search engines such as Alltheweb.com will crawl through the links to other pages on your website and index the sub pages on your site as well as your homepage, on other search engines such as Altavista you will need to submit each page manually. 

There is usually an instruction or information on the submission page to let you know about this.

Search engines can take weeks to visit your website, and patience and ongoing effort is necessary to establish worthwhile rankings. You should check the position of your website on a monthly basis, using the key phrases you have defined. If your website has not been indexed you can resubmit, but you should not submit your site more than once a month. 

Submitting to Directories

Directories are different to search engines in that they are compiled by humans rather than computers. 

Important directories to be listed on include: 

• Yahoo!
  http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
• LookSmart
  http://aboutus.looksmart.com/
• Open Directory
  http://dmoz.org/add.html

For commercial websites payment is necessary to submit to Yahoo! and LookSmart. For non commercial websites it may take some time to see a listing for your site included. However, once in, all three should bring your website quality traffic. 

When submitting your website to any of these directories the title and description you enter into the submission form is crucial to how your site will be listed. Ensure that you include your most important key phrases, and keep your entry short and to the point. By doing this the editor will hopefully not see a need to reword it and take out all of your key phrases. 

Open Directory is free for commercial websites to submit to and results from this directory can also be seen at Google, All The Web, Altavista, HotBot and Yahoo.

The next article in this series will look at paid listing in search engines and directories and at paid placement.

<< Part I: Preparing for Submission

>> Part III: Paid Placement and listings

Lynsey Willis

Lynsey writes a useful monthly newsletter on matters related to search engines, you can subscribe at her site.