ITI E-Commerce 

Back

Search Engines

Ten Places you MUST Submit your Site

 

(Remember we have our ITI specialized submission page with DotAnything.com here, and be sure to print out a log here, to keep track of your posting.  The DotAnything page has timing for repeated postings.)

"Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site"
          (Seven still-free listings and three worth paying for.)
                                                                        by Jim Daniels

This tutorial will not promise you a top search engine
position. It will also not reveal how to get your site into
thousands of search engines.

Instead, you will discover the exact locations where you can
submit your website for free and the few "paid submissions"
that are actually worth the price.

Yes, there ARE still places where you can submit your
website for free. There are actually seven extremely busy
search engines that have not (not yet anyway) migrated to
requiring payment for listings.

Here's a listing of these engines along with the URLs where
you can add your site(s) for free:

1. Lycos
Add URL: http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html

2. Google
Add URL: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

3. HotBot
Add URL: http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp

4. Northern Light
Add URL: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

5. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project
Add URL: http://dmoz.org/add.html

6. Direct Hit - An Ask Jeeves Service
Add URL: http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html

7. Fast - (Formerly "All the Web")
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3

Those seven search engines above have been responsible for
sending literally thousands of visitors to my website over
the past year. And they will send thousands more. And
perhaps the best part is that I didn't have to pay them a
dime.

But that's not to say that paying for a listing in a search
engine is a bad thing. Sure, lots of "purists" have been
bashing the search engines' move to charging for listings.
But let's face it, they are in business to make money too.
And advertising revenue is not what it used to be for many
of these companies. Their CPM (cost per 1000 banner
impressions) rate has dropped significantly and they need
other revenue sources. So why not charge businesses for a
listing?

Now as a small business owner you cannot go around and start
paying every search engine that wants a hundred bucks or
more just for the privilege of listing your site (or just
considering it!) So you have to concentrate your budget on
just the search engines that can deliver serious website
traffic. Those are the engines, or networks of engines with
the most traffic themselves.

After researching the field, I've narrowed this down to just
three that are undoubtedly worth the price. They are...

8. Yahoo! Business Express
http://help.yahoo.com/help/bizex/

Currently $199 for non-adult sites, Yahoo! still has the
busiest directory by far and you'll get lots of traffic
from a decent listing.

9. The Looksmart Network's Express Submit
http://submit.looksmart.com/

Also $199, this network powers over 1/2 million websites
including AltaVista, CNN, Excite, iWon, Microsoft Network,
Netscape Netcenter, NetZero and WebCrawler.

10. Inktomi's Search/Submit service
www.networksolutions.com/catalog/searchsubmit/welcome.jhtml

At just $30 a year for the first URL and $15 for each
additional, this is a cheaper solution to the Looksmart
Network submission. Inktomi powers searches through AOL,
iWon, MSN and the Looksmart directory itself. The best part
is that the network updates every 48 hours so you get your
listing in quickly.

OK, there you have it. A quick, cut to the chase, search
engine submission guide. Just be sure that before you submit
your site to ANY search engine or network that your site is
ready to be listed favorably. This means adding targeted
keywords to your content (this is that extra paragraph you find at the bottom of our DotAnything.com Stealth Forwarding Form), META tags (Keywords) and Title and Description as well as
spell checking and browser checking your site. Once you are
sure everything is set to go, visit those 10 URLs and submit
your site!


---
Tutorial by Jim Daniels