A Short Tutorial on Website Submissions & Linking to your site

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your site to the search engines is a pain, make ... But with a top twenty listing on ...
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to bring 50 visitors a day to your ... a pain that is Submitting your site to the search engines is a pain, make nomistake.
But with a top twenty listing on Webcrawler alonehaving the capability to bring 50 visitors a day to your pagesit's a pain that is worth suffering.There are a great number of search engines around, but only thetop 15 or so really generate serious traffic for most sites.Many of the lessersearch engines are 'meta search' types, meaning they actually gettheir results from the bigger engines anyway.Of the main engines, there are two categories - Directory based,and Spidered based.The Directory based (which includes Yahoo, Looksmart and the OpenDirectory Project) are generally added by hand. This means aneditor for the chosen category looks at your site and awards it aposition (or not) based on how he/she rated it.The Spider index types, (including Lycos, Inktomi and AltaVista)use robot browsers to check and index the sites based onpre-programmed criteria.In general, to get a good listing in the Directory engines meansyou must impress the editor with the look, ease of navigation andcontent of your site.
Make sure your first page loads veryquickly (empty your browser cache before checking) as this is animportant factor. If your 'front' page doesn't open within 10 -15 seconds you will not get a high placement.
If need be, createa simple 'Welcome' page that opens quickly and use it as a frontdoor to your site with the more graphic laden pages with in it.With Directory engines, if you have midis on your page be sureyou include an "off " control. You will be penalized if not.Don't over do images or clutter - the editors read hundreds ofthese sites a day and will be likely to have a lot in the queuebehind you.
They want to judge your site rather than your tastein art or cartoons and music selections.Spider based engines are more predictable. Spiders scan yourpages looking for your keywords, count the number of times thekeyword occurs through out that page, and measure it against theoverall length of your text to calculate how relevant your siteis to the keyword.Your keywords need to be set in the keywords meta tag, and shouldalso be included in your description, and to occur AT LEAST oncein the first 200 characters of text in your page.
For this reasonit is wise to not try to target too many keywords on a singlepage, try to pick simple word-pairs. Make sure you pick phrasesor words that you will repeat several times in the actual text ofyour page and that they describe your site to a viewer not to arobot.For the same reasons of relevance to keywords, try to stick toone specific topic per page.
If you deal with two differenttopics then you risk the chance of only 50% of the page beingdeemed relevant to either topic.Assuming your site is now optimized to be rated by the enginesyou need to start submitting. There are some tricks to this too.Firstly, submitting to FFA (Free For All) Links pages is a goodidea.
Most spiders will place your site far more highly if theyhave found lots of other sites linking to you. Once you submitto any Spidered Search Engine you should add your site to as manyFFA pages as you can find, once per day, for about two weeks.
Youwill get a lot of junk mail in response to these submissions -one from each site generally, but most have exactly the same textin them so you can set your mail program to automatically deletethem by using filter settings.The best value listings of all are the Inktomi database. Thoseused by Yahoo, Hotbot, ICQit and many others, and the ODP (OpenDirectory Project) which is used by a list of Engines too long toeven consider listing.
Getting into the ODP database is now theonly way to get listed in the AOL net search. AOL use spiders toindex sites found in the ODP directory so you can see why itwould be so important to be listed.Top Five Directory Databases(1) Open Directory(2) Snap(3) Yahoo! Web Sites (Inktomi)(4) Yahoo! Directory(5) LookSmartNormally, you will submit to these directories one time for agiven web site.
It is extremely important that you submit to themcorrectly the firsttime and choose the very best category. Be aware that it's oftendifficult to get a directory to change your listing later unlessyou send them a letter of explanation.Here's where it gets complicated:Submitting to(6) HotBot (an engine) - will get you listed in all Inktomibased engines.(7) Netscape: Netscape draws its results from Open Directoryfirst.
If no matches are found there, then it searches(8) Google. Therefore, we submit to Open Directory (a directory)and Google (an engine) to become listed on Netscape.(9) AOL Search: AOL will search Open Directory listings first.After those matches are displayed, it will then draw results fromInktomi.
Again, we submit to Open Directory using our directoryguide, and to HotBot to be fully listed in AOL Search.(10) Magellan: By submitting to Excite will get you listed here.(11) Excite will get you listed in Magellan. They pull from eachother's database.(12) MSN: MSN draws results from LookSmart.com first, then afterthat, matches are displayed from(13) AltaVista.
Therefore, we submit at www.looksmart.com (adirectory) and to AltaVista to be found in MSN.Additionally there are very popular Search engines to submit tothat can be found on many web sites using search box's.(14) Infoseek/Go Network(15) Lycos(16) Planet Search(17) WebCrawler(18) What-U-Seek(19) WhatsNu(20) Northern LightI hope the information given will aid you to get your sitesplaced in the search engines so give some thought to yourkeywords, check your load times, make sure your site is easy tonavigate, and get submitting.To learn more about how Search engines rate sites and other tipsI would recommend visitinghttp://www.searchenginewatch.com---------------------------------------------- Resubmission's are just as important----------------------------------------------After all the hard work you've done to submit your site, don'tneglect it by hoping you will stay on top - YOU WON'T!You must resubmit your site at a min of every 4 weeks. Thereare some great programs and sites out there that can submit yoursite for you so be sure to book mark at least 3 sites if youdon't have sumitting software.I use a calendar here to remind me when I am due to resubmit.But for beginners the easiest thing you can do is, submit on the1st of every month.
Your site will remain fresh in the databasesand show it as a current site submission. With the informationabove you are armed nowso you know what sites will give you the best results.With out question you NEED to get listed in the ODP site - thoughthe evaluator may be your competitor and my not register yoursite in his section, this may not be the case with other linkcategories that follow the the same theme.
You want to be listedin as MANY categories as you can (what's the worst that canhappen? They say no?) So submit to each available listing in themain category. ---------------------------- Linking to other sites -----------------------------Who should you try to get to link to you? In simple terms,anyone and everyone.
In more practical terms however, it dependson the effort and what you have to give up in return.Exchanging a banner ad on your site for a link from a highquality busy site may be extremely valuable for attracting newvisitors. The banner may however, redirect your hard soughtvisitor to the banner site and away from yours.
Banners also tend to clutter a web page, increase the load timeand distract your visitors. You can only put up a limited numberand then what do you exchange?When was the last time you cruised a link exchange site lookingfor somewhere interesting to go? The fact is people look forsites with search engines or by search lists and recommendationsat related sites.
Link exchanges will produce few if anyvisitors and if they do they will probably not be primecandidates for your product or service. That is not unless youhave a link exchange site yourself.
Not necessarily. There is actually a growing value to havingthese links to your site.
As previously mentioned, many searchengines, especially second generation engines, are starting touse site popularity as a way to rank your site. In other words,a site with 100 links to it will rank higher in the searchresults than a site with only 5 or six.
It is consequentlyimportant to establish links to your site both for the trafficthey can generate directly and for the indirect value ofimproving your search engine ranking. Although Link Exchanges may be of value, it is better to putyour initial efforts into exchanging links with other relatedsites.
Not only will they generate more visitors, the visitorsthey do generate will be better qualified.What about competitors? Sometimes competitors attract viewers whomay not find exactly what they need. If you allow yourcompetition to also have a link what's the harm? The idea is toattract the viewer.
link pages if you have a lot of links andput any Link Exchange banners on your site. Put these at thebottom if you do decide to use them all to often these bannerswill hang while loading and cause the page itself to hang - mostviewers will not wait long so play it safe, and put it at thebottom.
This way the viewer can still see your site and then thebanner later.Joining Web Rings related to your topic if one is available orcreate one if not is another option available to attract viewers.With E commerce now on the rise shoppers want to find the bestdeals by having all the related competition in one ring it makesit easy to find what and were the best deals are. The key tousing rings, is in the registration of the page - you must usethe full URL address of the page that will host the banner forthat ring.
This is especially important if your site uses frames. Article Tags: Search Engines, Results From, Make Sure, Open Directory, Link Exchange Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .