Search Engine Submission Basics

A majority of search engines charge a fee for submission. There are also some good search engines that allow you to submit your site for free. There are a few search engines that offer free submission services. Although, listing of your website is not guaranteed through free submission, it is always recommend submitting your website to a search engine with free submission.

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps. There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and submission services.

Most search engines charge a nominal fee for every URL submitted. You are more likely to get favorable results by submitting your website to a search engine with paid inclusion. AskJeeves, Inktomi, AOL, and LookSmart are the most popular search engines in this category. Once you submit your website with these Search Engines, your website is most likely to be listed within a week. The Audience potential for paid search engines is 100%. Search engines generally list pages of ten to twenty results per page. Most search items will return thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of results. The key, however, is to get listed amongst the top results if expect to get any traffic through these search engine results.

There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines. One is to use Search Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part of MSN Central. The fee for submitting URLs using this service ranges from $79 to $299 per year. Another is to submit your URL by submitting it individually to popular Search Engines and thus avoiding the fee charged by submission services. The prevailing counsel is that manual submissions should be made to the top five search engines or so and one could use automatic submission services for the rest.

It is possible to submit your URL to search engines for free. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that there are premium programs offered by some search engines that assure listing or provide better positioning in ranking. Some use of paid listing programs is recommended if you wish to receive serious traffic on your website from the search engine. Paid Listing Programs are explained later in this chapter. Free submission could result in much lower traffic, a low rank and positioning amongst the results returned, and longer period of time before your website actually shows up in the results returned by the search engine. Also there is no guarantee that your website would be included with these free services. To avoid these issues some search engines offer “paid participation” that guarantees high traffic and ranking for a fixed fee per year.

Formulating a Search Engine submission budget is crucial. It should be such that you have the best possible combination of free submission, paid submission and paid placement programs. How much would you like to spend on this exercise? If the budget is limited, options such as some of the paid programs, advertisements, expensive directory listings will have to be forsaken and attention given to getting the best results from limited but focused efforts.

The key is to strike a balance between free and paid programs that yield maximum ROI. You should submit your website to all the free search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and WebCrawler, at least one paid search engine such as Inktomi ($89 for submission of 3 URLs), and Yahoo Directory ($299 a year). Apart from these, you should think of submitting your website to a couple of “paid participation” or “paid placement” programs such as Google Adwords and Overture, which are discussed later.

Google is probably the most widely used web crawler search engine. One way of letting Google automatically detect and include your web page URL is as discussed in the above paragraph. Submission to Google through its free listing program can be done using the Add URL form available at http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Having mentioned that, there is no guarantee that Google would include a web page submitted to it by either of the free methods. Also, it might take as long as a month before Google lists your web pages. Google has advertising program called Adwords that offers you a combination of paid listing and positioning of your pages in search results. Paid listings in Google appear above and to the side of its regular results. These are discussed in detail in the section on Paid Placement programs.

Google allows maximum 5 to 10 web pages from a website to be submitted per day.

Other web crawler search engines with both free as well as paid submission services are discussed below. The free submission method for these search engines is very similar to those described in the case of Google. To submit a homepage using Add URL, you would have to use one of Inktomi’s partners. HotBot UK is recommended for this purpose.

The submission through the addurl feature is levied a penalty on ranking if that is the only way the page has been crawled. If the same page gets covered through normal crawling or through paid inclusion, the ranking penalty is removed.

Inktomi has a paid submission program called “Search Submit” that charges a fee of $39 a year for your homepage. More web pages can be added for $25 per web page. After a year, if you do not renew the service, Inktomi might drop your homepage. Inktomi’s partners sell this program. Inktomi allows maximum 20 web pages from each website to be submitted per day. Inktomi also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time someone clicks on your web page listing.

The Add URL page for Fast Search: With this it might take up to six weeks until your web pages show up. Fast Search’s paid submission service cannot be accessed directly by you. It can be used through its partner Lycos. The fee for this service is $30 for one year. Additional pages can be submitted at $12 per page. Fast Search also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged every time someone clicks on your web page listing.

This is owned by Ask Jeeves, one of the popular search engines. Teoma, however, doesn’t have a free Add URL feature. Teoma, being a web crawler can always include your homepage for free if there are other web pages pointing to your homepage. Like other engines, it has a paid submission program for a fee of $30 a year. Additional pages can be submitted at $18 per page.

This is another very popular search engine. AltaVista does have submission via the Add URL feature at http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl. As discussed with other search engines, free submission might take more than a month until your web pages show up. An automatic submission through submission software may not work with this URL, as it requires insertion of a specific code that is displayed on entering the submission page.

Following services are offered by Alta Vista. Express Inclusion: According to Alta Vista, this is the fastest method of including your URLs as Express Inclusion lets you add up to 500 URLs to AltaVista’s search results within 2 business days. It does Daily refreshes (weekday only)and keeps your listings fresh. Trusted Feed:This service is reserved for partners who submit more than 500 pages to the AltaVista database. Trusted Feed enables submission of custom titles, keywords and abstracts and provides the clients with highly qualified traffic through weekly updates.

Listing Enhancements: This service visually distinguish your pages in the AltaVista search results with Listing Enhancements. It also controls the look and feel of your results by adding logos, icons, custom taglines, and text links to your URLs.

Reseller Program: AltaVista’s Reseller Program provides you with the opportunity to deliver highly qualified traffic to your clients’ sites by using any of the following programs: Trusted Feed, Express Inclusion, and Listing Enhancements.

Basic Submit: This is the basic submit service which enables the clients to add or remove up to 5 URLs at a time from the AltaVista global database. URLs will generally be evaluated within four to six weeks of submission. Basic Submit is a free service. As discussed with other search engines, free submission might take more than a month until your web pages show up. An automatic submission through submission software may not work with this URL, as it requires insertion of a specific code that is displayed on entering the submission page.

AltaVista’s paid submission program has a fee of $39 per page for six months ($78 for a year). For additional 2 to 10 web pages the fee is $58 per page per year, whereas for an additional 11 to 500 web pages the fee is $38. AltaVista also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time someone clicks on your web page. Fortunately, there are ways to verify and whether your site has been listed or not. This is described in the section on “verify and monitor listing”. Directories are very popular and are widely used by people as a source of information. Web crawler search engines may also have better chances of finding your website if it is listed with any of these directories. Most of the directories charge a fee for listing your website. Some sites such as Yahoo offer free submission as well. An important aspect of submitting your website to a directory is to have a 25 word or less description of the website. This allows the web crawler search engines to efficiently find and include your website. Yahoo, LookSmart and Open Directory Project are some of the most popular directory services on the World Wide Web.

Yahoo provides two submission options: Free submission known as “Standard” and paid submission known as “Yahoo Express”. The free submission cannot be used for commercial websites. Also, with free submission there is no guarantee that your website will be approved for submission.

LookSmart provides listings used by the very popular MSN Search service and AltaVista. Hence, like Yahoo, it is essential that you submit your website to LookSmart. LookSmart also provides two options for submission: Free submission for non-commercial websites and Paid submission for commercial as well as non-commercial websites.

LookSmart paid submission charges you a nominal fee every time a click is registered against your website. Free submission cannot be done directly from LookSmart. It has to be done through a site owned by LookSmart known as Zeal.com. Once your website is approved for submission, you can submit your website by using the “Manage” link at the top of each of the categories.

Having your website listed with Open Directory is essential. It provides results to Google, AOL, Lycos and Netscape Search. Open Directory doesn’t have a paid submission service. Commercial as well as non-commercial websites can be submitted to Open Directory absolutely free of cost. This, however, has its drawbacks. There is no guarantee if and when your website will be approved for submission. Having mentioned that, Open Directory does generate high traffic for your website, once approved. Thus, submission to this directory is worth the uncertainty involved.

Submission can be done by using the “Add URL” link at the top of each of the categories. Generally, if your website is accepted, it would appear within the directory in about three weeks’ time. If rejected, there is no limit to how many times you can resubmit your website. These are three most important Directories on the World Wide Web. Getting your site listed on each of these is a must as it can lead to a significantly large audience for your website.

The maximum length of the Title of the website should be 60 characters for Yahoo, 65 characters for LookSmart and 100 characters for Open Directory.

Description of your website is essential for submission to any Directory. The maximum length of this description for Yahoo is 25 words or 200 characters, 170 characters for LookSmart and 25 to 30 words for Open Directory.

Yahoo requires that you submit the Title, Description, Your name and Email for website submission, whereas LookSmart and Open Directory only require the Title and Description of the website. Yahoo allows a maximum submission for one category per website; LookSmart and Open Directory allow a maximum submission for one category per URL.

Thanks to Ken Mathie is a marketing consultant based in Darwin, Australia. His specialities include Online & Offline Business Development and Management, Training, Marketing and Software Development.