Search Engine Submission

Search Engine Submission

All of the search engines provide a free facilty for submitting your website to their index. What they can't tell you is when and if your site will appear in their index. I've found Google and Fast to be the quickest to add you to their index, typically in under a month. In addition, these 2 search engines may also perform a very thorough spidering of your site from the submission of just your home page, providing you have structured linking throughout your website. AltaVista will also index your website from just your homepage, but this may take 3 months or more from the initial submission.

You need to observe the maximum number of pages to submit per day to each search engine, otherwise of you over submit the engine may consider that you're spamming and penalise you. The number varies but 5 per day is acceptable. Resubmitting on a weekly basis is the norm.

It is generally considered that pages that a search engine spider 'discovers' itself via links will acheive a higher ranking than a page that is submitted directly. The downside is that waiting for the spider to visit your website will take longer to get into the search engine's index than if you submit the page directly. Many people will submit a page from a diiferent domain that links to the one to be spidered. In fact this is essential with Google, which won't add you to its index until you have at least one link pointing to your website from another domain.

Once submitted, it is quite possible that the search engine spider (the spider collects pages and follows links between web pages and websites for the search engine) will revisit your website at around monthly intervals to re-spider your website. There is also the possibility that it won't, in which case you'll be dropped off their index and you're traffic from that source will cease immediately, so submit at least monthly or weekly if possible.

Express Submission Services
Most of the search engines are now offering an express submission service to capitalise on the demand to get onto their results pages sooner. Being indexed sooner and also having a high ranking webpage on that search engine do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, but at least if you're being re-indexed at a higher frequency, you can tune your pages more often and in theory obtain a top ranking page sooner. Fast, Inktomi (used by HotBot, MSN, Overture (Goto), and many others) and Altvista all have express submission services. As of this writing, these services are too new to determine if they represent good value-for-money. We'll look at these in a future update.

Submission Software
There are numerous software packages available that offer submission facilities and one or two have basic webpage analysis. WebPosition provides submission focused on the major search engines (which will probably account for 0ver 95% of your search engine traffic anyway) and in-depth web page analysis.

Features to look for in submission software are good quality reporting of ranking on the engines for specific keyword phases, alerts when you try to over submit to a particular engine, and a scheduler to help you automate the submission process. Free trial versions are available for most of the packages.

Online Submission Services
These are generally cheap and cheerful services that offer quantity rather than quality; they submit your website to dozens or even hundreds of search engines (even though the top 10 may well account for over 95% of your traffic) and if your site isn't optimised it still won't achieve a high ranking position. These services are only suitable if you have an alternative strategy to bring traffic to your website and simply want a presence on the search engines, or you're not dependent on your website for business but wouldn't mind generating the odd enquiry from it now and then.

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