For successful on-line business or Internet marketing and advertising, one of the key factors is to get to your web site as many visitors as possible . In order to make it happen, the first and the basic step is to list your web site in the biggest web search engines and Internet directories. The second step would be to optimize the web pages for the search engines, to get higher ranking and to list it on the first pages of the generic serch engine results.
Many search engine and directory submition services exists in Internet. Most of them offer URL submition to hundreds of internet directories and search engines. But do you realy need it?
In fact there are just only three big search engines, for that it is realy worth to spend some time to get your site listed in their data base.
According to SearchEngineWotch.com in July 2006 the US web surfers have done 43.7% of all searches in Google, 28.8% of the searches are made in Yahoo, 12.8% in MSN and the rest 14.7% are done in AOL, Ask and other servers.
Checking my web site log files, I can also see that more than 60% of the first time visitors arrive in my web sites after a click in the Google’s generic search result. The other hits are generated mainly by direct visits from returning visitors, signatures in forum posts, from lisings in DMOZ, yahoo and MSN searches and from listings in local directories.
Hence, for one web site it is important to:
- Add its URL to Google , Yahoo and MSN
- Register in DMOZ
- Register in local internet directories and portals
The following links will direct to:
- Add URL to Google
- Add URL to Yahoo
- Add URL to MSN
- Add URL to DMOZ
For the first three search engines, it is enough to submit your index page only. Once they visit it, the next time when search engines bots crawl Internet, all links under the main page shall be visited. This way the search engines collect information about the links locaten in the internal web pages, so on the next crawl these new links shall be included too. Every time the search engine visit one web page (URL) it collects information about the links listed there and add them to its database for futher indexing.
Note that it might take from one to three monts after submitting your first URL to one search engine before appearing in its search results.
To help search engines collect more links from one web site at once, site maps are implemented. The site map can be created as a separate web page or it could be search engine specific.
Regarding DMOZ, it is a human edited directory. To successfully add a URL to DMOZ, it is important to have a quality web site and to have contact details listed on the web site. First locate a suitable category in DMOZ and then use the link ”Sugest URL”. It will be added in their data base and will be verified by an editor, who may accept ot reject it. However, this may take a month or more.
Tips for quick inclusion in the main search engines.
As soon as domein name is registered, it is best to host it and create one or more web pages that will represend the basic web site structure. Let say the web site is about selling products. Then it would be worth to create the main index page, the about us web page and the products web page. Put a couple of words only.
For example:
On the web site index page write “Here will be the XYZ company web site. We sell XYZ products. Please visit us again next month when we expect to open this web site for you.”
On the about us web page “We are XYZ company. We provide XYZ services/products. Please visit us next month to read the complete information.”
On the products page “Our product catalog includes XYZ products. We are working hard to prepare this web catalog for your reference. Please visit us again next month to find more information about our products and the special offers that we have for our first visitors.”
On each of the pages above create also links to the other pages - a simple navigation menu. Then just add each of the pages to the above mentioned search engines, but do not submit to DMOZ yet. When one URL is submitted to Google for example, it might take a few weeks while the URL is visited by the search engine. Use this time to prepare your web site and to add more contents on its web pages. When the web site is ready, it will be already inxed by the search engines. It might take a few months more to start generating good traffic from the generic search engine results.
