Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. It's all in the planning - Part 8
In which we discover how (and how not) to submit your site to the search engines
Now that you've done all the keyword bits and sorted out your meta tags, as we discussed in the last instalment of this series, you'll be wanting to get your site listed at number one position on all the major search engines! OK, pilgrim, slow down. There's really no need to get into an almighty knicker-twisting session, because one thing's guaranteed - you will not see results immediately.
Indeed, you may not see results for weeks, perhaps even months in the case of some of the engines, but, eventually, you'll see your site listed on the engines.
Majors
Aside from AOL's own AOL Search There's Google, AltaVista and DMoz - the Open Directory Project. This latter is one of the most important as far as you are concerned, since it feeds many other search engines, as does Google, and is the basis for AOL Search. (The really clever bit is that Google uses DMoz listings too!)
For this reason, We'll look at your submission to DMoz first.
Step One
Click on the link to AOL Search above. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll see a link that says "Add your site" - but to save you a journey, just click here
Step two
Decide on the category that best suits your site, and navigate your way to it - this the most time consuming part of the exercise - the closer you get to a suitable category, the better. For instance, the demonstration website I keep linking to (www.strange-brew.com) is very tightly categorised - do a search on "Strange Brew" (the name of the band) and check out the category it's in - very closely and tightly categorised - by the way, you'll find it ranks number 5 when you do that search.
If you check out the four that beat it, you'll see they they're not all that relevant.
Step three
Now click on the "Add URL" link you'll find at the top of the results page - you may need to click on the category link above the results to find the link ( this is actually true in the case of a search on "Strange Brew Band")
Here you'll find you have four fields to complete
1. the URL itself - your Website address
2. the Title of the site
3. a short description of the site
4. your email address, which is optional, but you should complete
The URL part is obvious - but, if you've got a redirection to your site from a domain name, I'd strongly suggest that you use the absolute address (in our case, although we've got www.strange-brew.com, our entry in DMoz is actually http://strangebrew.users.btopenworld.com ) If you do, you'll find your rankings are actually higher (this applies to other engines, too).
Your description should be very accurate, and very short, but also serve as a teaser - give this a lot of thought!
Your title should reflect the title of your home page.
There are notes on the submission page that will give you very good guidance as how best to fill in the fields - read them carefully.
Step four
Wait. From here on in, you have no control. Eventually, your site will be listed, or if it's not going to be, you'll be emailed with the reasons as to why not. I'd be nipping off to Google and submitting your URL there, too, but that, too can take some time to have any effect.
Timing and Spamming
Please, if take nothing else from this article, take this: the search engines do not like what they've christened "Spamming". Having a few domain names pointing to the same site and trying to get them all listed, for instance, is not the done thing, and you'll be penalised for it - demoted down the rankings or even dropped altogether. Also, there's absolutely no point in repeatedly submitting your site - I know of one site that was submitted every day for a month. It's nowhere to be seen on the search engines at all.
By all means, have a monthly check, and if you're not already listed, submit again each month until you are, but no more frequently than that.
Neither should you re-submit every time you make a change to your site -- the major search engines spider very regularly. I know I've edited the day before a spider and I've seen the results the very next day as the entry in the engines has been updated, so there's no need to constantly trawl your entries yourself.
Finally, be patient, and don't expect too much in the way of traffic initially - you need to do some work with links, which we'll cover in the next instalment
