Submitting Your Site to Search Engines and Directories

Regardless of which type of business you currently have, you will definately want to have a website and begin marketing it on the world wide web. After you have designed your website, the next step is to ensure it is properly "optimized", meaning that it's body text(the text you see), title and meta tags(the text that you don't) all have the words you are trying to be found for on the search engine results.

Many individuals optimize each individual page of their website for a different search engine, but I recommend that you focus on the biggest Search Engines like Google and MSN Search. Some high profile Search Engines such Altavista seem to be fading in importance fast so it may not be crucial to optimize any pages for such engines that only send a small amount of traffic anyway. I recommend a keyword density of about five percent on the keywords you wish to come up for. While these search engines are of prime importance for your site, you should not rely fully on Search Engines or Directories for traffic to your website. You will want to try other tools like web logs (also known as "blogs"), an e-zine you publish, free-for-all pages, usenet, articles, bulletin boards, and so forth.

The first lesson about search engine submissions is to simply do it by yourself. This will also save you much needed capital that can be better spent elsewhere. Even though here are a plethera of automated submission services out there, it is recommended that you submit your website to at least the primary Search Engines manually. This is due to the fact that the primary search engines are so vital, and some of them automatically reject any submission made from a program. Furthermore, each search engine has different allowable numbers of keywords and they vary on how many characters your site description can be. They also want different kinds of personal information (althought in some refreshing instances they just ask for your web address). Submission software, even when accepted, is generally not flexible enouph to cover all the bases. Plus, the reality is that manually submitting your website is easy enouph that anyone can do it, and I mean anyone who knows how to type a word. You essentially just go to the Search engine you want to submit to and click the "add website" or "add site" link. Then insert the website address. Actually a few are a tad more complicated than that, but most are really that easy. This is what some people are paying seo firms to do for them, sometimes not as well.

Some Search Engine "spiders" or "crawlers" will eventually find your website if you submit your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to them or not. They will find your site by following links from other websites that link to yours. For this reason you should consider trading links with other similiar but non-competing websites. Doing this will also give you website a higher ranking on some of the major search engines. This is because some engines, like Google and MSN for example, rate your website at least partially on it's "link popularity" with other websites. This is also a free way to help your site recieve more traffic without wheelbarrels full of venture capital. And sometimes these free methods are as effective than more expensive strategies and do not always take up more time.

Although meta tags are not as critical to your site as they were in the past, they are still of some value. Concentrate mainly on the title and description tags and make sure the keywords you want to come up high for are there. To find out if your meta tags are optimized, go to scrub the web dot com as they have a free meta tag checking service. They will automatically spider your webiste and give you suggestions on how many keywords each of your tags should have, etc. Some search engines, such Inktomi still give a relatively high relevence to these tags.

When creating your "Alt" tags for your pictures on your site, do not stuff too many keywords there as the Search Engines, at least some of them, seem to be getting wise to this tactic and may penalize your page. The main Search engines and Directories you should focus on for yours site include Google (which is currently the most popular), Yahoo(you need to pick a category to submit your site if you are submitting to the directory side. Some categories are free to submit to and others are not), Search.msn.com, Inktomi(used in several search engines. Pay for inclusion or you can wait untill the spider finds your site for free), ODP or thr Open Directory Project(critical to be listed here, go to dmoz.org), Looksmart(free and paid listings) and Lycos.com.

For more information go to Home Business Articles and find out more about search engine optimization in the business article archive.

Ryan Joseph is writer/researcher. For more info visit http://www.aaronsfreebies.com/