Why submit my site?
The most frequently asked pages on the web
are those of the searchengines. Websurfers are using
these services to find and select the information they
need out of billions of pages that are available on
the web. Therefore it is necessary that owners of websites
inform the searchengines about their websites. This
can be done by submitting your website URL (the internet
address or domainname of your website) to the searchengines
of choice. Submission means telling the searchengine
that you want your site to be listed in the searchengines
database. This is normally a FREE service. After submission
a robot visits your site to check
if your site is ok for inclusion in the searchengine's
database.
If you don't submit your site to searchengines,
you will probably not receive a growing number of visitors.
Unless you invest a lot in marketing your site. And
the traffic can also grow in case you have registered
a URL that is simple to find and that covers the content,
like flowerdelivery.com or usedcar.com. If you still
do not have a domainname registered, visit the
domain registration page to select and register
one or try your luck on a .COM name with this box (please
type without "http://");
In all other cases you need to wait until
robot a visits your site automatically. This might happen
when the robot follows a link that another site had
to your site. In that case you could be included into
the searchengines database the robot works for.
And of course there is always the possibility
that you on not want your site to be visible. In the
robots topic we offer tips to
prevent your site or certain pages from getting indexed
in a searchengine.
How to submit my
site?
Submission can be done manually or by using
an automated site submission services on the web; those
saying "Submit your URL to 1550 searchengines for
only $ 99,00".
Manual submission has certain advantages over automated
submission. The most important one is that you will
submit your website to a searchengine according to the
procedures of that searchengine, and you can monitor
the progression of your listing. The disadvantage is
that you can not do that many searchengine submissions
as an automated service does. See it as a difference
between quality and quantity.
Manual submission
For manual submission of your website, you
need to take some actions.
Whitelines.net helps you in this process by offering
the direct links, listed on the countrypages, to the
submission pages of the searchengines.
Most "submit URL" pages ask you
to fill out a form specifying your URL and email address.
Some searchengines want more information like company,
address, but also page titles, description and keywords.
This mostly is the case if you want to add your site
to a directory.
After you have submitted the form a robot
will visit your site and if the robot likes it your
site will be indexed and listed in the database of the
searchengine. In case of submission to a directory,
a human editor will visit your page, review it, and
decide on inclusion.
The visit of a robot to your website or the
review of an editor does not give any guarantee that
your site will be included in the database of the search
engine. Whitelines.net will try to help you here, and
give you the most necessary hints and tips to make a
submission successful. So, please read this page carefully.
Submit the toppage
only?
There is an ongoing discussion about how
to submit a site. Some say that you should only submit
your top page to a search engine. Because the spider
(robot or crawler) of the searchengine will visit this
page and from that point it will crawl to the other
pages on your website. It is then of course important
that (starting) links to your other pages are listed
on the top page, or on the pages that are linked from
the top page (and so on). In fact this is the concept
in which most spiders find their way around the web.
Others say that submissions for every page
are necessary. This is called a "deep submit".
Deep submission ensures that all of your pages are indexed.
However, avoid submitting too many pages; it's considered
spam.
We do not have a clear answer here. We only
can advise you to follow the procedures of a submission
form of a certain searchengine. If it does not mention
anything about this topic we advise you to submit the
top and the major pages of your website. Not more than
five per day.
Log the date of submission
It is wise to log the date of your website
submission. With this date you can monitor the progression,
because most searchengines will suggest you submit again
if you are not listed within a certain amount of time
(mostly two months). You might also need the date of
submission when you want to discuss the submission of
your website with the people of the searchengine.
When will my site
be indexed?
The time between your submission and the
actual indexing normally varies from two weeks to two
months. Some smaller searchengines index in a shorter
timeframe, but the major ones take this time.
Unless you pay for your submission. Major
searchengines like Altavista, Lycos, Looksmart and Inktomi
ask amounts varying from $ 59 to $ 299 for each submission
(annual fee) and guarantee a review of your site within
1 to 5 weeks.
Where should I
submit my site?
We advise you to submit your site to all
the major search engines. These are listed in Step
4. You should also submit your site to the regional search engines
of your country, this means if your site meets the submission
criteria of these search engines. Goto Step 5.
In some countrylists it becomes obvious that
searchengines use services of other searchengines. The
most frequently used toplevel databases are dmoz.org
and Inktomi. But also Alltheweb, Google, Looksmart and
Fast are crucial sources. Make sure you get listed in
these toplevel databases.
What are robots?
Robots are programs that automatically follows
the internet's hypertext structure by retrieving a document,
and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.
Robots have similar functionality as normal web browsers.
Normal Web browsers (Netscape, Microsoft
IE) are not robots, because the are operated by a human,
and don't automatically retrieve referenced documents
(other than local images). Robots do this without any
interaction. Web robots are sometimes referred to as
Web Wanderers, Web Crawlers, or Spiders. These names
are a bit misleading as they give the impression the
software itself moves between sites like a virus; this
not the case, a robot simply visits sites by requesting
documents from them.
The information that tells a robot what to
do (or not to do) is listed in a file called robots.txt,
listed in the root directory of your website. This file
contains the following (bold faced) information:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Templates/
"User-agent:" indicates the name
of the robot to which this information applies. With
the asterix (*) you indicate that this information is
meant for every robot. "Disallow:" specifies
the directories of your site that should not be visited
by the robot. The example tells the robot not to visit
/Templates/. You can include multiple disallow lines
in the robots.txt file.
With "Disallow: /" you tell the
robot not to visit your site.
The page title
We recommend that you first read the hints
and yips for searching search
engines, before you continue.
We think you would like to see your website
ranked in the top 10 of the results in case somebody
looks for certain keywords. We offer you a few easy-to-implement
tips that help you along this road.
The page title is most important factor that
influences the ranking of your website within a searchengine.
The title should not be longer than 60 characters (including
spaces), and appear in the top of the HTML code of your
page delimited bij the <TITLE> and </TITLE>
directives. Make sure your title covers the content
of your page. Avoid using titles like "Welcome
at Whitelines.net". It does not cover the content.
This relevancy with respect to content is
also valid for the keywords and description meta tags.
The keywords and
description meta tags
Meta tags are used to provide information
about a document. Meta tags can be read and understood
by robots. The meta tags are listed
in the top of your HTML code between the <HEAD>
and </HEAD> directives. Most searchengine robots
support the standard keywords, description, author and
robot meta tags. These tags will give Web page creators
some control over how their pages are ranked and how
they appear in the search results.
The most important meta tags for the ranking
are the description and keyword tags. The description
tag returns a description of the page in place of the
summary that the searchengines would ordinarily create
making it easier for users to determine if the site
is relevant to them. The keyword tag provides keywords
that the searchengines associate with your page and
this will help improve your site ranking.
The keywords tag has a maximum length of
874 characters, including spaces etc.. A keyword should
not be repeated more than three times. So do not add
a keyword tag like <yellow flowers, red flowers,
blue flowers, purple flowers>. The description tag
has a max size of 150 characters.
Example of meta tags are;
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="flower
delivery service, Den Haag">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="We deliver
flowers within the area of Den Haag">
The number and location
of keywords
The keywords you have described in the meta
tags should be mentioned on crucial locations on your
page. Searchengines prioritize pages where keywords
appear "high" on the page. To achieve that, use your
most important keywords for your page headline. Mention
them again in the first few paragraphs of that page.
The more you mention them, the higher on the page, the
better you will be ranked.
Because of the structure of HTML code the
use of tables and Javascript can "push" your relevant
text further down the page. This might result in the
fact that keywords are regarded less relevant by the
searchengine. The words in the second column (the right
part) of a two column table appear lower than the words
in the first column. Make sure you also use the keywords
in the first column!
How often can I resubmit
my pages?
Resubmit your site any time you make significant
changes. The robots of most searchengines will revisit
your site on a regular schedule, but some of them do
not do that automatically. Resubmitting after major
changes will help ensure that your site's listing is
kept up to date.
What is link
popularity?
Next to relying on meta tags or keywords,
a search engine assumes that a page receiving hyperlinks
from other pages is an important page and therefore
deserves to be ranked higher. Today's link popularity
algorithms go one step further and consider the link
popularity of each originating page, meaning that when
a highly-popular page points to another page, it makes
the target page popular, too.
The key is to make sure that your page is
linked-to from as many other websites as possible. You
can for instance try to get listed on the available
start and linkpages.
Google is the
most popular search engine on the internet. This engine
uses an interesting but complicated mechanism to determine
linkpopularity. It is called Google PageRank. I want
to recommend you to read our comments on the Google
PageRank mechanism, and to have a look at our Google
PageRank calculation example.
What about paid submission?
A growing number of searchengines are offering
paid URL additions. They guarantee your site will be
submitted within a limited amount of time. The alternative
is to get visited by a robot for free, but this might
take a while (6 weeks - 6 months) and no guarantees
are given.
Examples are Altavista,
Inktomi, Teoma
and Yahoo!. All ask $$ and
guarantee submission within 1 to 6 weeks when your site
qualifies for inclusion in the directory.
Pay-per-click searchengines allow companies
to bid on keywords that relate to their site. Companies
submit their site's descriptions and titles, along with
a list of keywords to the engine. They also specify
the amount of money that they're willing to spend on
each keyword.
For example, if you choose to pay $.20 for
the keyword "puppy food", while others pay only $.19,
your site would rank first. If, on the other hand, you
pay $.02, you may rank low. For most pay-per-click engines,
companies pay only when a visitor clicks on their website
from the search results (clickthrough). Most engines
specify a minimum amount of money needed for a company
to open an account. Examples are Overture.com
and Kanoodle.com.
Netflip.com is
an example where users get paid when they visit a site
that is using the pay-per-click mechanism. Users have
to register themselves first. Because of this registration
Web marketers can focus on certain users based on keyword
terms, gender, age and zip code. For example, a woman
searching NetFlip for the term 'shoes' will receive
different search results than a man searching for the
same term.
This service is getting very close to be
an electronic commercial marketplace. The advantage
is that every time you enter a certain shop you receive
a dime. The disadvantage is that the number of shops
(and therefore the goods and services they offer) is
limited. Netflip has over 1.000.000 registered users
and more than 20.000 websites included (June 11th, 2001).
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