Section 2.2. Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

2.2. Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:

• A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the search engine's index.

• Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search for a particular keyword or phrase.

To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.

Unless you have money to burn, I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves or by third parties.

If you have inbound links links to your sitesfrom other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your siteeventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?

It's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited resultsbut at least the price is right!

Getting a site listed in an online categorized directoryparticularly the Open Directory Project (ODP) or Yahoo's directory as I explain in "Working with Directories" later in this chapteris probably the most effective way to get inclusion in the search engines themselves.

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process up by manually submitting your site to search engines.

2.2.1. Important Search Engines for Submission

Table 2-1 shows some of the most important search engines to which you should submit your site, along with the URL for the site's submission page.

Table 2-1. Selected search engines and submission URLs

Search Engine	Submission URL
Ask Jeeves / Teoma (registration required)	https://sitesubmit.ask.com/Main/login.jsp
Google	http://www.google.com/addurl/
MSN Search	http://search.msn.co.in/docs/submit.aspx
Yahoo! (registration required)	http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

2.2.2. Submission Tools

You may also want to use an automated site submission tool that submits your site to multiple search engines in one fell swoop.

It's quite likely that your web host provides a utility with this functionality that you can use to submit the URLs for your hosted domains to a group of search engines. Figure 2-1 shows the results of a site submission using the tool provided by one web host (you'll probably find that your web host provides something similar).

Before using a site submission tool, you should prepare a short list of keywords and a one- or two-sentence summary of your site as I mentioned in "Creating a Plan and a Story," earlier in this chapter (you can reuse the keywords and site summary as keywords and description data in your <meta> tags). Alternatively, if you have already created meta information for your site, as I explain in Chapter 3, you can use the keywords and description in your meta information for search engine submissions.

Figure 2-1. This web host utility lets you automatically submit your site to a number of search engines at once

If the tool is provided by your web host, probably you will be able to submit only your domain, rather than directories within the domain, for example, http://www.braintique.com but not http://www.braintique.com/research/.

If you search Google with a phrase like "Search Engine Submit," you'll find many free services that submit to a group of search sites for you. Typically, these free submission sites try to up-sell or cross-sell you on a product or service, but since you don't have to buy anything, why not take advantage of the free service? The two best-known examples of this kind of site are Submit Express , http://www.submitexpress.com, which will submit your URL to 40 sites for free (just be sure you pass on the various offers you'll find on the site) and NetMechanic , http://www.netmechanic.com, another search engine submission site along the same lines.