ION's Search Engine Optimization Training: Instructions for Search Engine Submission

SECTION NINE - Effectively submit your site to Search Engines and Directories

Ready to submit your site? Don't even think of submitting before you've got quality, screened content with plenty of keywords thrown in, META Tags, a robots.txt file, and basically have completed all of the 58 steps that came before this section. Why? Because Spiders are fickle, and there is a chance that they could remember your first indexing long after you've optimized your site further.

Once you have completed the total optimization of your site like the 8 sections before this one have demonstrated, you should immediately submit it to as many relevant Search Engines and Directories as possible, so they know to index your site each time they go hunting for their food. Still, there are all kinds of factors that dictate where to submit it, how often you should submit it, the best process to use, Etc., so this page was designed to get you through it quickly and with as little hassle as possible. And naturally, we show you how to do it all for free.

SEO terms you might want to review for this step:

Submission

Auto-Submission

How to effectively submit your web site:

If you haven't done so already, download and install the WEB CEO freeware version:
- Web CEO's free optimization tool suite.
  (8.69 MB Windows download)
  
  Although Web CEO offers many free tools in this software suite, some that we even refer to in other steps, today we are only going to talk about their Submission section. It is the fourth option under the "Promote" menu, titled "Submit URLs." All Search Engines and directories in this frequently-updated database are quality, real search engines or directories, never FFAs or link farms. It's a good strategy to submit to everything you can in here, as long as your site matches each engines' requirements.
Under the auto-submission tab, enter all of your general website and personal info for the site you're submitting and then go to the next tab to choose all the search engines to submit to. Select them all but before you submit you can do yourself a favor by de-selecting the ones with the limitation out to the side that don't fit your site. Some only allow other languages. Some don't allow businesses, some don't allow personal sites, etc.. But the majority will fit your site. On the right side of the page, select the pages of your site that you've optimized. Each one is sent to each search engine you submit to, so it's like you're submitting them all separately. Don't worry, this software won't let you spam the engines. It knows to space each page out and only submit them one per day, for instance. In many cases you must keep the software running for a period each day in order to get the maximum effect.
The third tab shows you the progress of the whole submission, with the big green submit button at the bottom. Make sure you've not submitted to any of these engines before in the last 30 days, and then click the submit button.
Also, you can check your status on the fourth tab, which tells you how many Search engines accepted you or why they didn't. This page gives you a lot of insight into the world of search engines simply because you see the problems each has with your site or not.
Click on the "Manual Submission" tab above. It holds the list of Search Engines that require manual and/or paid submissions, along with the all-too-important directories. I currently advise you all to NOT spend any money on paid submissions right now, excepting maybe the $299 charge for Yahoo!'s paid submission... And only then if you need it listed immediately and are really trying to get every last click possible... Otherwise, just use their free submission which only takes a "few weeks" to get your site crawled. It IS included in the software suite, but it is difficult to find. So here is Yahoo!'s free submission link in case you missed it: (EVERYONE should submit to this!)
- http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
The most important directories are of course Yahoo! and DMOZ. (The Open Source Directory) All search engines start their monthly crawl from those two starting places so be sure to be in them. In general, the more places a search engine can find a link to your site, the higher your Page's 'Rank' with that engine, and that includes listings in directories. For that reason alone I am constantly looking out for all the directories that will accept my site. You should too, so don't leave any out if they'll have you. Submit to each and every Directory that allows you to, according to their own policies.
Below is a list of the most important FREE directories that you can all submit to, excepting maybe sites with sexual or Hate content. In our professional opinion, you should submit your websites to each of the following. Simply post your site in them all exactly once, no more. (So make sure if you use the WEB CEO Directory submit page, DO NOT SUBMIT A SECOND TIME TO ANY OF THEM!)
1. All The Web Sites (Free account required)
2. DMOZ - the Open Directory Project (LONG wait, but worth it!)
3. Ezilon
4. illumirate
5. Jayde (Requires newsletter sign-up)
6. Massive Links (Free for non-commercial sites only, businesses $9.99)
7. Mavica (May take a while to get added.)
8. Search City (Free account required)
9. The Super Ultra Mega Web Directory
10. Tygo (6-8 Weeks Waiting Period)
11. World Site Index
12. Wow Directory (Currently Backlogged)
For all of your manual submissions to Search Engines and Directories, and maybe a few automatic ones too, you will soon get an email to confirm your submission. Often these will come with advertisements, some quite pushy, in fact... Just ignore them and respond to the emails as they instruct you to in order to complete your submission... None of them have ever spammed us too badly. Soon after you've made those responses, between 2 days to 2 weeks, your website will start showing up around the web in quite a few places. This is your traffic foundation, and we're going to build on it for the rest of our remaining steps.
The WEB CEO software will automatically re-submit to the specifications you set up for each engine as long as it is running each day. (Each day it needs to take any action, that is.) I keep mine running overnight to make sure everything gets submitted. After about six months, watching your traffic & keyword tracking application, you can start fiddling with your keywords (doing more keyword searches and replacing the highest-ranking keywords in your page code) and resubmitting to the search engines again, but never, ever more than once per month. Also in that time, you should have built a lot more content to your site and convinced many other related-topic sites to link to you. If all went well, your page or site should be showing up in 1st page results on any search engine!
If you would like to try some other Submission tools, we have a couple of online versions in our Submission Tools page that are fast and easy to use... Although they're more limited. (around 30 search engines only, each.)

What exactly is a submission good for, anyway?

When a Search Engine like Google starts it's monthly spidering of the web, it needs a starting point. Actually, it needs a lot of starting points to get a full sampling. Every submission we make is like a bookmark to it that it launches to 'out of the gate.' It makes sure to visit each and every one of the submissions it has been given that month, indexing the whole site and following its' links. After that, directories are the first places it goes through afterwards. Namely, DMOZ and Yahoo, which are the undisputed kings of bookmark collections. What does this mean to you? Well, for starters, each time you've been submitted to a search engine, it's a sure thing that you'll be visited by Santa-spider soon. How well your site is indexed is up to you, (like your robots.txt file or meta="robots" tag indicates) but at least you know that 'jolly ol' Saint Arachnick' is coming.

This is not the end of a submissions' worth, however. The more Search Engines you're submitted to, the more likely a searcher is to find you, because you never know which engine he or she will use. (OK, so most of the time it's Google or Yahoo... But you should try for more than "Most of" your possible target audience!) My favorite reason for submitting, however, is to build PageRank. The more REPUTABLE directories your site is submitted to and listed in, the higher your PageRank climbs, because each reputable directory is as much a website with a vote as any other. And when you're starting out, you can use as many of these kinds of links as you can get. We'll go into that much deeper in the next step, on raising your PageRank and Link Popularity through link exchanges and other methods.

Now it's time to get down to the real nitty-gritty task of convincing others to link to your website... The next step is easily the most time-consuming and all-around nail-biting task in the whole kingdom of SEO. Don't worry, we've got some powerful tools to make it go much easier than it sounds.

Click here to continue on to Section Ten.

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