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Search Engine Submission

Before you take the final step and submit your Website to the search engines, you should first of all check for two important things.

1. Your website has no broken links (including images). A broken link on your Homepage may result in not all of your pages being spidered.

2. Run your Website through an HTML validator either online or offline. This can be done online through the official W3C validation site here. You can also download a good HTML editor tool, which has a validation check built into it k. A good example of which is HTML-Kit. Poor code can be another reason for a search engine spider to stop spidering/following your pages.

Once you have checked your site for broken links and have validated it, you can now finally submit it to the search engines. There are 3 main ways to submit your website to the search engines.

1. There are various software packages which can be downloaded for the use of submitting your site automatically to the engines. The advantage of using software is mainly that you save yourself a lot of time as you only enter your site details once and then normally click a button and the site will be submitted automatically to the major and minor search engines.

There are however several disadvantages to using software, especially regarding the more important engines. Some search engines do not like automatic submissions. Altavista for example recently incorporated a password into their submission process in order to stop automatic submissions. Another major disadvantage is more 'peace of mind' than anything else. You are relying on the software to submit the site correctly. After all the optimization effort you put in, it is normally wise to be 100% sure that your site has been properly submitted. This is not always possible with software submission, sometimes they are slacking in their search engine updates, so submission can occur to a wrong address. For the smaller less important search engines, submission software is however quite suitable.

2. Online submission through third party websites and services. There are numerous online services in which you can enter your url for batch submission to the search engines. One advantage is that submission can in many cases be done free of charge. There are however some services which will submit your Website for you for a fee. There is a need to be very cautious when using any online automatic submission service. Firstly, you rarely get any proper reporting. You click the button and cross your fingers in most cases. Even those that do provide submission reports, you have to take their word for it with no confirmation from the search engines themselves. You should be particularly wary of those services that offer to submit your site to hundreds, or in some cases, to thousands of search engines. The reason here is that 90% of your search engine traffic comes from the top 5 search engines. The rest of the engines are either small engines where you will get extremely little Web traffic , or worse, FFA (free for all) lists, which are nothing more than email collecting scripts for the sole purpose of spamming you day in and day out. Of the 3 methods of submission, this one has to be the worst option.

3. Manually submit your Website to the search engines. Submitting manually to the top 10-15 search engines has many advantages over the other two methods mentioned. This method can however be time consuming. Submission is an important step towards geting your site indexed, and in our opinion, one where corners should not be cut. At ABAKUS we submit all our clients websites manually. For some of the smaller engines we may use software but if time permits we even submit manually to them as well.

In order to help you submit to the search engines we have developed a special submission page where you will find links to all the major search engine submission pages.

Here are a few additional search engine submission tips.

1. Read the search engine guidelines! There you will find out how many pages you may submit per 24 hour period, whether the search engine will whats called deep crawl and pick up all of your sites pages, and other search engine specific guidelines. This is very important as some engines will consider many page submissions in one go as spam. Altasvista for example limits you to just 5 pages per session. The last thing you want is to fall down at the submission phase.

2. When/if asked for a description be sure to use descriptive text using your keywords and not simply a comma separated list of your keywords. Be sure the text will draw people into clicking on the results link.

3. A good combination to submit to a search engine is 3 pages. Your home page, your site map (if you dont have one, consider making one as it can help to make sure all your pages are visited and indexed) and one other major page when submitting to those engines that deepcrawl your site (they follow all links and index every page they find).

Submitting to web directories is comprehensively covered in the directories section of this site.

Once you have submitted to the search engines...