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 SEARCH
ENGINES - Tips and advice for submitting your site
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INTRO
There are a number of different methods to
increase the traffic to your site, one of the
easiest yet most effective methods is submitting
your site to various search engines. How powerful
are search engines in promoting your site? Well,
recent figures show Yahoo had well over 16,000,000
visitors and even if 0.5 % of these people chose
your subject matter for their search it would
still mean a whopping 8'000 visitors … not bad
for a few hours work. Another fact is that 90% of
all traffic is generated via the top ten search
engines … there must be something in it.
So why isn't everyone doing it you ask, well they
are, but simply submitting your web address to a
search engine (of which there are many to choose
from) and expecting great results is an extremely
ineffective way of gaining visitors. If various
factors are taken into consideration, for example,
the use of meta-tags and key-word phrases you can
dramatically alter your positioning in the search
engine ratings. Unfortunately, information on
search engine and directory submission changes
almost daily and to write out every pro and con
would be endless. So after trawling through the
web and fishing out the best pieces of information
I have come up with a in depth article on the use
of search engines as a basis to boost your visitor
counter (and hopefully your click-through ratio).
I will start by going through the basic methods
and techniques involved and then on to some of the
tricks of the trade and conclude by briefly
looking at some of the better known search
engines.
Quick Definition
There are in fact three different kinds of search
sites to choose from. The first is a 'Search
Engine', which in basic terms is a large database
queried through a web page. Website owners will
add their site to the database by filling in a few
forms, this will instruct a 'spider' to visit the
submitted URL. When the 'spider' reaches the site
it will scan your HTML for relevant material
(normally by means of Meta tags) and send the
information it has gathered back to the database
for listing. A commonly used example of this is
Lycos. The second search method is known as a
'Search Directory'. A search directory is similar
to the engine (in terms of using a main database),
the only real difference is that instead of a
'spider' adding your web address to the database,
it is done by hand, thus it is more accurate. A
well-known example of this is 'Yahoo'. The final
search method is via a 'Meta Search'. Instead of
having its own database this method uses a program
to query a number of databases from other search
engines and directories, a popular example of
which is Ask Jeeves. In this report, I am going to
concentrate on the use of search engines as they
are far more commonly used than the directory or
Meta search (although many of the techniques that
are going to be mentioned are also shared with the
two other methods).
Important Pointers
One of the great things about search engines is
that they are FREE - for the moment! This is why
one of your main priorities is to get ranked as
high as possible on search engines (as they are
finding new ways to improve their profits, for
example, by charging for higher listings). I shall
go into detail on how to improve your positioning
and other important factors in submitting your
site later on in the report. What is important
though, is that submitting your site (and
submitting it properly) is only one half to search
engine promotion. The other half is to monitor
your site's positioning (and if it starts to fall,
catch it and fix the problem right away).
Another important pointer is that the main search
engines each have their own style and methods when
it comes to finding your site. There are both
positive and negative aspects of the 'magnificent
7', which I shall return to later.
Search engines tend to change their criteria
regularly so a good listing today may not be rated
so highly tomorrow! It is good to be indexed on as
many search engines as possible thus cutting down
the percentage of your business loss if you
disappear from a large search engine or directory.
A point on web design is that 'spiders' do not
like web pages with frames. They have trouble
collecting the information when trying to get
through the frames. So try to avoid frames if you
possibly can. Another thing you should try to
avoid is the use of software that produces extra
pages culled from your site. Search engines do not
like this software and you can in fact be
penalised with a low ranking if you are caught!
Submission
So now that you have your new website up and
running you need to get as many unique visitors as
possible i.e. promote your site to the
world-wide-web. There are two ways of submitting
your site to an engine: you can either use a 'Mass
Submission Program' (MSP) or submit it by hand.
There are both positive and negative points to
each technique of submission and in the long run
it is you who is going to decide on the
appropriate course. MSP is when you use a
particular program to submit your site to the
largest of the search engines (see 'Let someone do
it for you') and quite a few others. The obvious
advantage to this is that it is extremely fast and
normally requires only one form to be filled in
with the relevant details. Another benefit is that
the programms will also submit your site to
smaller search engines that you would never have
thought of in the past (thus bringing a bit of
extra traffic to your site). The negative side to
MSP is, in general, that it does not do as good a
job as submission by hand and is certainly not as
accurate. Also, on some of the sign-up forms you
are only offered a limited number of categories in
which you can place your site. This would have a
negative effect on fine-tuning your target
audience (especially with Yahoo).
Hand submission is by far the more accurate way of
submitting your site. If you submit your site by
hand you are able to optimise your site to get the
better listing on a search engine. Unfortunately
by submitting your site by hand, you are going to
have to stay up all night, laboriously puting your
details into every engine (believe me when I say
it is a big chore). If you are someone who doesn't
really have the time for the web and just wants an
extra bit of traffic, I recommend the MSP method.
If on the other hand you want more targeted
traffic and have time to spare I suggest
submitting your URL by hand.
Once you have submitted the various pages to a
search engine, it shouldn't end there. Web pages
(and sometimes even whole sites) can get dropped
from search engines as a result of servers being
down, software bugs etc. If you want your site to
have a good ranking you need to submit your web
pages on a regular basis. I am not talking about
every few days but submitting three times a month
will cover any drop in ranking from occurrences
like, for example, updated cache results for
popular searches.
Tags
Hopefully by now, you would have worked out how
you are going to submit your site, but before you
press the submit button you need to do some
background work on the different 'tags' you are
going to use for the engines' spiders. Tags are
fundamental in promoting your website and gaining
a high position in the search engine. If you think
that approximately 25 new WebPages are being added
to the internet every second, you need to stand
out from the rest (i.e. create a search
engine-friendly page). There are numerous tags
available, for example, image alt tags (which are
the small pop up boxes of text), header tags (it
is good practice to repeat the page title in the
header tags and use headers that support the
content on the page) and underline tags (they
allow you to underline certain words and phrases).
I feel Meta keyword tags and less so, Meta
description tags (which provide users with a brief
description about your page) are extremely
relevant to the job of a search engine
In basic terms, Meta tags are little snippets of
HTML that are placed between the head tags on a
web page. Meta tags are important for they contain
information that a search engine can use to help
your ranking within their results. They allow you
to tell the search engines what keywords and
descriptions you feel are relevant to the page
that is being submitted (so the engine won't have
to guess what your page is about). Please remember
that it is not ONLY the Meta tags that are used by
search engines; InfoSeek uses meta tags,
description tags and key word tags to index pages.
On the whole the majority of the large search
engines concentrate on the subject matter of the
Meta tags. If you are new to Meta tags, a good
place to start would be http://www.searchenginewatch.com.
They also off a free newsletter for ongoing search
engine advice.
Key words Search
Ok, so now you have the tags, what words should
you place in them. Please note that keyword
searching is the most common form of text search
available and the majority of search engines do
their text retrieval using keywords. Unless you,
the web-site owner, specify the keywords for a
certain web page it is up to the search engine to
determine them (i.e. it will pull out words that
it thinks are most relevant). It is also up to you
as a web master to make sure the words that you
choose reflect the subject of each page.
There are a HUGE number of different ideas and
variables when it comes to choosing your keywords.
Some good practice skills include looking up
keywords that your competitors use (www.findsame.com)
and setting yourself a target of hundreds of
keywords or phrases. You should also name pages
using keywords; instead of calling them
'page1.htm' call it the name of the
service/product you are offering.
Important issues that can sometimes be forgotten
include misspellings (this shouldn't be overlooked
as even the less obvious variations of words
attract traffic), phonetic representation (say
your key words out loud and write down what they
sound like. For many visitors try to guess the
spelling of a word) and pluralisation (while
indexing your site, many engines will
automatically append the plural to the single
keywords, but it is not always certain that they
will pluralise a key phrase search).You should
also try to change two keywords into hundreds of
keyword phrases, for example, from 'frying' and
'pan', you can get 'frying-pan', 'fryingpan', pan
frying' etc.
Some people find it almost impossible to gain a
top position with a keyword and rely solely on
keyword phrases to bring in qualified leads. I
believe a mixture of both words and phrases works
well in the search engines. It is good practice to
place phrases into the title and Meta keywords and
especially the headings and body of the page.
If you are really serious about the use of
keywords, then it is advisable to think about the
non-English speaking visitors (it is predicted
that Chinese will be the predominant language of
the web by 2006). To attract foreign visitors, you
should include the relevant foreign keywords in
the Meta tags. If they find your listing on a
search engine and can understand the English
title, they will click through.
Most of the search engines themselves have set
forth various guidelines for the use of keywords,
for example, the character count for the amount of
keyword tags should be around the 1,000 mark (Altavista)
and a keyword within a tag should not be repeated
more than seven times (it should be noted that a
number of search engines are now penalising for
excessive repetition).
Keyword searching does have its negative side
though. It tends to find it difficult in
distinguishing between words that are spelled the
same way but mean something different.
Unfortunately this tends to lead to hits that are
completely irrelevant to the said query. Search
engines also cannot return hits on keywords that
mean the same thing, but are not actually entered
into the query.
Concept-based search
There is an alternative to keyword searching and
that is concept-based searching. Unlike the
keyword search, the concept-based search systems
try to determine what you mean, not just what you
say i.e. it returns hits on documents that are
'about' the said subject you are searching.
The best known example of a search engine that
relies on concept-based searching (a.k.a.
clustering) is Excite (which sticks to a numerical
approach and calculates the frequency with which
certain important words appear). My opinion is
that keyword searches are more accurate, because
to get a really precise result in a concept-base
search, you need to enter a lot of words, which
then needs to be refined.
The 'magnificent 7'
The 'magnificent 7' refers to the seven largest
search engines available; if you manage to get a
high listing on one of these, you should be pretty
well-off traffic wise. As I mentioned earlier,
each search engine performs searches using a
variety of different techniques. To help you in
your submission techniques I will quickly go over
the methods of each one and tell you the positive
and negative aspects to each engine.
· Alta Vista - this engine uses all the words in
your HTML (except comments). It is a fast and
powerful search engine with a huge number of
features allowing for an extremely complex search.
Beneficial points include fast searches and the
fact that it recognises both proper nouns and
capitalization. It also uses both the web and
Usenet. Unfortunately with Alta Vista, multiple
pages from the same site show up too frequently,
but overall it is one of the best to join and use.
· Excite - Excite develops summaries from your
web page from the text within your HTML (it
ignores Meta tags but tries to identify your site
by a dominant theme from keywords i.e. it uses a
concept-based search technique). Positive aspects
include a large index along with excellent
summaries. Regrettably Excite fails to mention the
format or the size of the hits it returns. It is
still a very popular engine to use.
· Hotbot - Hotbot bases it searches on your Meta
tags (both description and keyword). This engine
claims to be the fastest around because of the use
of parallel processing, which distributes the load
of queries as well as the database over several
workstations. It is an effective search engine,
unfortunately the help files are still not great.
· Infoseek - This engine relies primarily on your
Meta tags to determine your index number (if there
are no Meta tags, it looks at the first 250
characters on the page). Infoseek is a reliable,
powerful and extremely fast search engine due to
the use of the 'Ultraseek engine'. It is hard to
knock Infoseek because it also gives the URL of
searches, the size of the document and the
relevancy score.
· Lycos - Lycos uses a portion of your page as an
abstract and then sends one of its 'spiders' to
automatically choose the keywords that will be
associated with your page. It also offers the
opportunity to search for image and sound files.
With its large database and comprehensive results
Lycos should be a definite engine for you to
submit your site.
· Webcrawler - Like the majority of the top seven
engines, Webcrawler relies on your Meta tags to
determine your ranking. Webcrawler's popularity is
always increasing as it belongs to AOL (and as you
know many new surfers sign on from AOL). This
engine is easy to use and offers a service whereby
you can check to see whether a particular URL is
in the index. Webcrawler does not seem to be as
fast as the other engines and unfortunately there
is no way to refine a search.
· Yahoo - Although not exactly a search engine,
Yahoo is an extremely important resource. Yahoo is
very different to the other engines as it indexes
websites into different categories. The form asks
for your URL, page title, and category that you
would like you web page placed and a description
of your page (so it doesn't really matter what is
in your HTML). Yahoo is very easy to use and
navigate but only a small portion of the web has
actually been catalogued by Yahoo (restricting
your search).
Let someone do it for you
By now you should have a basic understanding of
how search engines work and the way they can help
to promote your site. If you are really serious in
getting a high rating and are willing to spend
less time but a little money, then I recommend
getting some outside help.
If you do not have the time to go to each search
engine individually and submit all your relevant
details then why not join the tens of thousands of
others and get a third party to guarantee a total
number of targeted visitors. Directories like
http://www.goto.com/, http://www.epilot.com/ and
http://www.netflip.com/ allow you to buy visitors
for 1 cent each!!! http://www.selfpromotion.com/offers
an extremely cheap submission service. For around
£10 you can use their multisubmit tool which lets
you submit 25 URLS at a time to several search
engines.
Another great piece of software is the Site
Promoter, which actually works to get your site
placed higher in the search engines (it picks the
right keywords for you and inputs your information
just the way the engine wants it).
Earlier on I told you the importance of checking
on your ranking after you had submitted your page.
A piece of software called Web Position Gold,
consistently and comprehensively monitors your
websites search engine position, making sure you
are ranked high. Web Position even allows you to
keep an eye on your competitors' rank in relation
to yours!
So there are a number of different pieces of
software and services that are available. What I
recommend to start with is that you submit your
web pages by yourself. This will increase your
confidence and make it easier for you to
understand how search engines work. When you have
grasped the fundamentals then maybe you could
think about getting some outside help, especially
if you plan on submitting your web addresses to as
many search engines as possible. Remember, the
more search engines and directories you sign up
to, the more visitors you will receive, and when
it comes to affiliate marketing, that can only be
a good thing.
James Cooper
UK
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