After reading a recent e-letter by SitePro News (www.sitepronews.com), it prompted me for this post regarding web site submission. Often, users submit web sites to search engines and they never are “spidered” or “indexed.” Hopefully with a few tips, this can all change.

Where To Submit There are numerous locations to submit your web site to. Obviously, you want to submit your website to the most popular locations such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL without paying much out of your pocket. Depending on what type of business you are, you can achieve this in a few different ways. If you are a small business, an entrepreneur, or just advertising yourself, you may want to consider some of the free services to get you started. One of the best free services out there is SubmitPlus.com. They offer a free top 10 submission (actually the “Top 10” minor search engines), a free listing of the “Best 100” search engines, a free site load test, and a free meta tag evaluation. Another free submission is the INeedHits.com Submit Free submission. This submits to 28 of the top “minor” search engines.

If you are a larger business, you may want to check out the INeedHits.com Inktomi or Ask/Teoma Pay packages. Both run around $30-40 for the first URL for 12 months express inclusion. This is great if you have daily content changes that you would want included in the engines. You may also want to check out the Submit Express (http://submitexpress.com/) paid inclusion.

How To Submit When you submit a site to any of the search engines, you have to make sure that you have a proper plan. Most newsletters that I have read regarding site submission all mention the same “keys” to submission. I would agree with most of them. However, your approach should be a little different depending on which engine(s) you submit to. Some engines are still electronic based systems, however, many are now being sorted through manually be humans.

The first thing you must be sure of is content. You must make sure that your content is original and organized in a proper manner. Failure to do so might actually prevent your site from being indexed. Also make sure that your content is listed in a professional manner. Secondly, choose a proper category for your site. Make sure that it is uniform from engine to engine. Don’t “spam” the engine categories trying to submit too often. It can take months for your site to be fully indexed. Unless you are using a pay service, don’t expect next day results. Last, make sure you have your contact information on your site. You should include an e-mail address (try not to use something like yourself@hotmail.com or yourself@yahoo.com – want to know why?? I will discuss e-mail etiquette in a future blog.) and your phone number and/or mailing address.

Other Submission Tips The biggest key to being ranked high is the number of backward links to your site. If you have others place a link to your site on their site, you will be amazed as to how quickly your site would jump from a low ranking to a middle or even higher ranking. One great tool for checking your ranking is the Google Toolbar(http://toolbar.google.com). This is a nice tool because Google not only shows the page rank for your site in the Google engine, but also AOL, Netscape, Yahoo and other engines (DMOZ.org). The DMOZ organization which operates the biggest site submission network allows end users to download the data and to become an Open Directory Project Editor. If you have further questions regarding the DMOZ or your Google/Yahoo site submission, you can post on their forum site http://resource-zone.com/ubbthreads.php.

Where your website is located is another big reason your site might not be indexed properly. I have heard horror stories of sites co-located on the same networks as “unacceptable” content (such as pornography, hatred, racist, etc) forcing these sites to be blocked. Be sure that if your site is shared that their is a strong connection to your site. If it takes longer than 30 seconds to load your homepage, chances are, you woun’t be indexed. This also means that the network in which you have your site hosted should not be dropping information packets on a regular basis.

Hopefully these tips that I have provided will assist you in your site submission. If you have any additional questions, by all means let me know.