If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business
is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing
is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper
or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results,
although, maybe effective in a small proportion.
Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to
hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to
submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself
or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine
companies and directories.
Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites
are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words,
good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that
are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide
information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be
pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.
Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site
would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are
thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime
before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor
to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which
makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’
hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.
There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services.
You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this
one:
Web Position
Or if you want professional help try the following sites:
http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission
http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.php
Don’t use the automatic submission services.
Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:
Search Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
Google, HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler
Directories
AOL Search Inktomi
Lycos Open Directory
MSN, Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap
Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory
companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible.
The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:
http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm
http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm