Search Engine Submission

Once you have a site created, set-up with your web host, and therefore live on the internet, you need to think about getting indexed and listed in the search engines. Unless you have a large database of prospects you can email, or have a lot of affiliates promoting your site, then search engines are going to be the primary way that people will find your site. This is therefore very important, and should be done as soon as your site goes live.

There are two main ways you can go about getting your site included in the search engines. The most traditional and obvious way is to actually tell the search engines that your site exists. This can be done by going to each individual search engine (start with the big three of Google, Yahoo and MSN), going to a link that says "submit url" or "add url" and filling out a form.

There is nothing wrong with this method, but the only trouble is is that it can take many weeks, and often several months, to get your site included in each individual search engine. Now I don't know about you, but I expect my sites to be indexed and getting good search engine rankings for my main keywords after a few months, not simply waiting to get listed.

There is a way that you can bypass this waiting period, and that's to make the search engine robots find your site, and subsequently index your site themselves. This can be very effective, and for most of my sites I've managed to get indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN in less than a week.

The key to getting indexed quickly is to get some incoming links to your site, ideally from largish sites with a good pagerank (PR) that get indexed regularly. Therefore when the robots index their site, which they do on a regular basis for high PR well-established sites with regularly updated content, the robots will come across and follow the links to your site. If these robots see enough of these links on a number of different sites, your site will get indexed very quickly, and therefore listed in the search engines. 

A common method touted by various search engine experts is to simply buy a text link from a site with a pagerank of 6 or above. There are sites such as textlinkbrokers.com who offer this service. The links are usually sold on a monthly basis, but you only need to buy a one-month link, just until your site's listed.

Being the cheapskate that I am, I prefer the free alternatives to get my sites listed quickly. These have been discussed in detail in other sections, but include the following:

- Posting in popular forums on subjects related to my site, with a link to my site (keyword rich of course) in my signature.

- Creating a free blog on blogger.com relating to my site, and posting daily with a link to my site at the end of each post, and pinging it with pingomatic.com after each post is added.

- Submitting my site to directories with good PR. If you can afford it, get paid submissions to get your site listed quickly.

- Writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Article Marketer can distribute them to around 30,000+ publishers for you.

- List your site on free advertising boards, such as Inetgiant, and other popular free advertising sites. The best one of all, in my opinion, is Craigslist because of it's very high PR ranking on almost every page and category.

- Exchange links with other sites, preferably sites in the same niche as you. Link Metro and Link Market are both excellent sites for finding link exchange partners.

If you use some, if not all of these methods, then the search engines will soon spider your site after following these links from other sites. Therefore you will quickly get indexed and will start appearing in the search engines. To check whether you are indexed , simply enter the URL of your site into the search box. As soon as you are actually in the search engines you can start targeting high rankings. See Search Engine Optimization for more details.