Submitting to Search Engines and Directories
You can’t get though life without hearing about search engines, but do you really know how they work? That’s kind of a trick question because search engines are notorious for changing their operating rules to get valuable content for the general public, not a supped-up site that a smart business owner has optimized to pop up in the results and try to sell them something. Fundamentally a search engine is a program that searches documents for specific keywords and returns results based on finding documents that contain them. Here is some basic information about the types of search engines, what they do and how they affect you.
There are a few types of search engines; general search engines, specialty search engines and meta search engines (aka meta crawler).
Specialty search engines, also called topical or vertical search engines, search sites that are relevant to a specific topic. For example, Sirus is a leading specialty search engine that looks for “scientific information only.”
Meta search engines, or metacrawlers, they send your information request to several search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results. Some examples of top metacrawlers are Jux2, Dogpile and Clusty. You do not need to submit your domain to metacrawlers; submitting to the primary search engines is all that it takes for them to find you.
Directories are a stockpile of human reviewed Websites that are arranged in topical categories. Unlike the search engines that use programs to review the Websites, directories have people do the work by hand. You will want to submit your Website to directories to increase traffic and backlinks to help improve your Website ranking. The most popular high quality directories are listed below (all have a page rank of 4 and above).
Note: some of them are free while others, like Yahoo, have listing fees. I will include the current fees to help you out, but please keep in mind that they are subject to change and may not be the same when you are ready to submit your Website.
This is not by any means a complete list. It’s only meant to get you started. If you wish to dive deeper into registering for directories you can Google top directories and continue to register for as many as you choose.
Directory Name URL Cost Page Rank*
The Open Directory Project www.dmoz.org/ Free Page Rank 8
Yahoo http://dir.yahoo.com/ $299/year Page Rank 8
Librarians’ Internet Index http://Lii.org Free Page Rank 8
Best of the Web www.botw.org $299/year Page Rank 6
Business.com www.business.com $299 Page Rank 7
Clush www.clush.com/dir/ $20 Page Rank 6
GoGuides www.goguides.com $70 Page Rank 5
Elib www.elib.org $90 Page Rank 5
Jayde www.jayde.com Free Page Rank 4
Skaffe www.skaffe.com $45 Page Rank 4
Starting Point http://stpt.com $99/year Page Rank 4
*Not sure what Page Rank is? Click on this link to learn more about Page Rank
For more details on search engine listings go to www.searchenginewatch.com.
Surveys of small-mid sized online business owners frequently report around 70% of their traffic coming from Google. Google currently holds approximately half of the search traffic and is growing. It has the power to provide you with a lot of traffic if you play your cards right. Of course, the most basic step is just getting listed in the first place so let’s get working on that.
*Note: Do not submit your Website to search engines until you are ready for it to be categorized and reviewed. The search engines will periodically record updates, but you do not want to submit your site until you have something that has been tweaked and tested and is ready for the public.
Search Engine Submission Strategies
If Google holds so much clout why bother to get listed with anyone else? Google holds a lot of the cards but not all of them. Why give up potential traffic? In addition, being listed with other search engines will actually help increase your page rank with Google as well.
You will be required to meet each of the requirements made by the different search engines. Automated search engine submission software will use standardized information that you provide them to submit to all of the search engines you request. The problem with this is that each search engine has its own slightly different requirements. If you provide them with poor information, you may be miscatagorized and ranked poorly, costing you precious traffic to your site. Getting errors changed also can be a slow process, costing you even more time and money. Although it may not be exhilarating work, submitting your Website information by hand to each company is one way to make sure that it is done properly.
Since you are not a professional search engine optimization expert and the rules of the game are constantly changing, you can give yourself an edge by studying the most current techniques for getting the most out of search engines. One great free newsletter is by a company called High Rankings. Here is the link to sign up www.highrankings.com/newsletter/
Hire a company to manually submit your Websites to search engines
This is not a cheap service. The companies that are good at this have specialists who know exactly what to submit to get the most out of search engines. That is a very valuable commodity and you get what you pay for.
Free Automated Submission Services
I would not recommend this. Submissions are based on a generalized submission form, but since each search engine has slightly different requirements, you could easily get miscatagorized or rejected for not meeting the requirements.