Search Engine submission Tips

Website Promotion

Ok, so you've either spent countless hours building your website, or you've paid a web-author alot of money to do it for you. Its very important you let people know about your site, or all that money and time will be for nothing. There are several good ways to go about promoting your site.

The first is to register with search engines and directories. Search engine registration is what this page focuses on, and is fairly simple to do with this interface. The 'search engine' uses a program called a 'spider' to 'crawl' (retrieve) your website, index it, and insert it into a huge database. This enables users to enter a few keywords, and locate related documents in the database. The 'directory' commonly has the same user interface for searching, however it categorizes URL's. This requires more work on the submitter's part, as there is no spider to automatically index the site. Often the submitter must enter the appropriate category, description, and other information by hand. However directories are very popular as they are easy for users to browse. Websites should be submitted to directories as part of the website promotion campaign. The most popular directory is Yahoo!

Another good method for site promotion is exchanging links with sites that cover the same types of information as you. This is often as simple as sending email to the site maintainer, letting him know you have a simmilar site, and asking if he would be interested in swapping links.

One of the most obvious, but often overlooked, methods of promotion is the conventional promotional materials your business maintains already. Your business cards, adds, and letterhead should be updated to display your website and email addresses. The web is one of the few places where your customers can get information on your product 24 hours a day, so its important that they know the resource is available

Spider Food

Its important that you add the appropriate Meta Tags into your HTML before submitting your website to search engines. These tags tell the search engine what subject areas your website deals with, and what description it should display when someone searches for your entry. The two tags that are vitally important are the 'keyword' and 'description' tags. The 'keyword' tag should contain a comma-seperated list of words which the search engine will use to match your page with someone searching for that word. The 'description' tag gives the search engine a short summary of your site to display to users who have found your site when doing a search. For example, here is the meta-tags for Quick Submit.

<meta name=keywords content="submit-it, search engine, spider,
registration, promotion, altavista, hotbot, lycos, excite">   
<meta name=description content="A quick, easy, and free  way to
register your website with the top search engines. Includes tips for
effectively registering your site to attract your target audience.">

These meta-tags should go between the title section and the body section of your webpage. The spiders will automatically pull out these words and place them in their database

What not to do

There are several no-no's you must watch for when you are trying to draw people to your site. Sending unsolicited email or posting your adds to innapropriate newsgroups is a good way to repel customers. You'll get publicity alright, but it will be the kind of publicity that advises people to not do business with you. Propery positioning yourself in search engines and uses accepted methods will draw large numbers of qualified customers who are interested in your specific product

Information Overload

So, you just want to sell your widgets to everyone on the Internet and would much rather pay somebody else to promote your site, while you take care of the important stuff like filling orders? Check out my former company's site promotion packages. They are good people, and know how to draw traffic like San Jose in rushhour.