How do I submit my website to Search Engines?
Just the facts pleasea
by Alyice Edrich
All materials copyrighted 2002

If you want to get known on the web, you must get your site listed in
the search engines, then work hard towards staying within the first
ten pages of those search engines.

One way to move your website up the search engine results pages is by
having web copy and meta tags that are search engine friendly.

Then you need to give away free articles associated with the content
of your website, provided the publisher includes a nice byline with
an active (clickable) link back to your website.

And finally, you need to move up those results pages by finding great
quality websites to swap links with you.

But before you can even consider moving up the search engines results
pages, you have to be listed in the search engines.

But how do you go about getting listed in the search engines?

Basically, you hunt down search engines you want your website listed
with, find their "submissions", "add url", or "add your site" link
and follow their instructions.

When you submit your website to the search engines, you do not want
to submit every single page of your site. Instead, you want to
submit your domain name (otherwise known as homepage or index page)
and allow the search engines to crawl (or spider) your website,
finding every page within that website.

Having a good site map is vital to allowing search engines to crawl
your site. If there is a page not linked within your website, it
cannot get captured and therefore, will not be searchable through
search engines.

You want to start with the major search engines, as they are the ones
most frequently used, then work on the smaller, less known search
engines.

One way to think about this strategy, is to think about the times you
do a search online. What sites do you utilize first? If those
websites fail to provide the information you were looking for, where
did you go next?

Should you pay to get your website listed in the search engines using
one of those submission programs? Personally, I think you are better
off hand submitting your website as some search engines do not accept
submissions from auto programs. Not to mention the fact that many
auto programs tend to spam your website to companies and free-for-all
links that do nothing for your search engine status.

Although it can seem like a bit of a nuisance, it is best to set up
two separate free email accounts... one for your newsletter
subscriptions and one for submitting to search engines, link swaps,
and article swaps. (I use Yahoo.)

Also, pay close attention to these submission sites, there is usually
a box that you can de-click or click-on that allows you to opt-out of
their newsletters, product updates, or from giving your information
out to their advertisers.
Where should you start?

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

MSN and Inktomi
http://free.submit-it.com/msnsubmit.htm

Dmoz Directory (AOL also uses this)
http://dmoz.org/

Other places to start submitting to:

All the Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Alta Vista
http://addurl.altavista.com/

Info Space
http://www.infospace.com/info/submit.htm

Jayde
http://search.jayde.com/cgi-bin/addurl.cgi

Northern Light
http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

Scrub the Web
http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Starting Point
http://www.stpt.com/?L=submit_form

Visca
http://www.viscaonline.com/

What You Seek
http://www.whatuseek.com/addurl.shtml

You can also find more places to submit your website to, by going to
google.com and typing "add url" in the search engine box.