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SurfSMART Online Marketing Guide Getting Listed on the Search Engines Note: Search engines prices, partnerships, acquisitions and who's powering who can change. The information here is updated as of June 2004. The largest search providers are Google and Yahoo. According to comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings, over 90% of the searches performed on various search engines on the internet come from either Google's Search Engine or Yahoo's Search Engine Technology. These two also have the largest number of users who search directly from one of their sites. AOL (powered by Google) and MSN (powered by Yahoo) follow close behind. Click here for a listing of the top search engines and links to submit to. To understand how to market your site to search engines, it is
helpful to understand how search engines work. Search engines use a
"robot" program to scan (sometimes referred to as spider or crawl) the web for URLs and
keywords. They then index (categorize and store) what they find. By
submitting your site to the search engine, you are telling the robot
program to scan and index your site quicker. The search
engine can find your site and scan it from the web without you
submitting it, but that could literally take years. (Though if you pay
for inclusion in some of the search engines or directories, it may speed
up the process). Getting good placement, top 20 or so, is much more difficult. Getting your site ready for promotion will help you improve your chances. Another way to improve your rankings is by getting your site linked on as many sites as possible. Many of the search engines are using popularity as a way to rank your site, so the more sites that are linked to you, the better your chances are of increasing your ranking on the search engines. And if you are listed on some larger sites, your ranking is improved. So paying for a listing on some of the biggies like Yahoo, can pay off in more ways than one! Help with those submissions! Now that you understand the process and have your site all ready, now what? Should you submit using a mass-submitter that submits your site to 100's of search engines at once? Here's some advise on the subject. Go ahead and use a mass-submitter, but only for the little guys. You should hand submit your site to all of the top search engines and indexes. Why? Well first of all, it doesn't take that much time considering the time (I hope) you have spent getting your site ready for submission. Secondly, many search engines don't like mass submissions. They may change their submission url to throw off mass submission occasionally and your site may never get to them. In addition, it is more difficult to target your submission for specific search engine categories and/or criteria which could hurt your rankings. Take the time and submit to the search engines listed here personally. Also, an important note, make sure you submit your site correctly without errors in the url, description, etc. because it is much harder to fix it then to get it right the first time. And when submitting with a pay for listing service, such as Looksmart and Yahoo, be sure to follow their guidelines carefully because paying money does not guarantee that your site will be accepted. |
Want us to market your site for you? Contact Us. The most important, "THINKING" about selling something on the Web? Anyone can!
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