Promote Your Website - Part II Search Tools
By Nowshade Kabir İRusbiz.com
Many companies after spending a substantial amount
of money on the development of their websites
assume that once the website is published on the
Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore,
do not take website promotion as seriously as
the development part of it. Today, with millions
of websites around, no matter how great your website
is, if you don’t promote it effectively,
you will not get the visibility that your site
deserves.
Effective promotion of a website starts with submission
of the site to various search tools available
on the Internet. There are two different types
of search tools – search engines and directories.
Search engines index their listings based on the
information retrieved by their spiders that crawl
through the Internet following links constantly
looking for new websites. The directory listings
are compiled by human editors from the URLs submitted
to the directory. If your website is listed in
the directories you can be sure that the spiders
of different search engines sooner or later will
index your site. That’s why you should start
submitting your website first from search directories.
Search
Directories
Among all the search directories available on
the Internet, Yahoo!
and DMOZ
are the most important ones.
Open
Directory Project or DMOZ
DMOZ
is the second largest human compiled search directory
on the Internet after Yahoo!
Open Directory Project
is a huge web directory of Internet resources.
All submission to the directory is evaluated by
volunteer editors. There is no fee to be paid
to get an inclusion in the directory. As a human
edited directory it might take more than a month
to get your site evaluated. Once you are listed
in the DMOZ,
within two weeks to two months your website will
start appearing on search engines like AOL Search,
Teoma,
HotBot,
Google,
Lycos,
AllTheWeb,
Excite,
Go2Net
and a number of regional search engines. At present
around 354 different search engines and portals
use data from Open Directory Project.
This is one of the main reasons why you must consider
submitting your website to DMOZ.
Submitting your site to directories is a bit trickier
then submitting to search engines.
Following
rules are common for almost all directories:
Make
sure you follow these rules while adding your
website in DMOZ.
This will improve your chance to get your website
accepted and reduce the processing time.
Yahoo!
Yahoo!
is by far the number one destination for Internet
surfers. Although the search results for Yahoo!
is provided by Google,
many people still prefer to browse through Yahoo!
directory to find whatever they are looking for.
This makes an inclusion to Yahoo!
directory quite valuable for ecommerce sites.
Yahoo!
presently charges yearly fee of US $299 for each
web site submitted. The fee is nonrefundable,
which means if for some reasons Yahoo!
declines to add your website in its directory
you will not get your money back! The only thing
Yahoo!
guarantees is that the editors will look at your
submission within seven days and send you an answer.
Should
you consider submitting your site to Yahoo!?
It all depends on the kind of business you are
in. Some sites receive an overwhelming number
of traffic from Yahoo!,
others hardly receive anybody. My suggestion:
list your website in Yahoo!
directory for a year and see the outcome. If
you feel comfortable with the result you are
receiving – continue. If the result is
not satisfactory you can always cancel their
service after one year.
LookSmart
Although it is the third largest directory on
the Internet as a search portal LookSmart
is not that popular. However, it provides directory
listings to MSN
search, About.com, Infospace, Inktomi
and others. It is probably still the best way
to get high ranking in MSN
search. LookSmart
is a fee based service. You pay US $49 submission
fee for the site review by their editors and 15
Cents for each click through. Pay per click minimum
monthly payment is US $15.
For
noncommercial sites LookSmart
has a partner directory named “Zeal”.
Zeal is a community directory for Internet surfers.
To submit a site to Zeal you first have to become
a member by passing a quiz test. The reason
I am mentioning Zeal here is – you can
actually submit noncommercial portion of your
site to Zeal and receive an appearance in all
of the places that LookSmart
listings show up, without paying a pay-per-click
fee.
Other
Directories
Other
small but notable directories that you should
consider are joeAnt,
GoGuides
and Gimpsy.
Don’t expect large traffics from these directories;
however, they will help enhance your link popularity.
Link popularity is a concept which means- how
many sites have links pointed towards your website.
Link popularity is important because your website’s
rank in the search results depends on it in a
big way.
Search
Engines
Search
engines use special programs to crawl the Internet
and index web pages. These robot programs are
called “Bot” or “Spider”.
Spiders crawl up the Internet using links. That’s
why it is so important to have back links to your
website. When you make a search, the search engines
show you the results that are retrieved from the
servers, where all the indexed web pages are cached.
Only when you click on a link from the search
result you see the real web page.
The
most important search engines are Google,
Altavista,
AllTheWeb,
Teoma,
Lycos
and MSN,
HotBot,
AOL
Search, etc.
Google
No
doubt that Google
is the best search engine available on the Internet
today. According to Google,
they have indexed over 3.5 billion pages up to
now! More Internet surfers are prone to use Google
because it has great search enhancing functions,
and you can always expect relevant and quality
search results.
You
can submit your link using Google’s Add
URL page located at http://www.google.com/addURL.html.
However, if you have links pointing towards
your site on other websites, you can be sure
that Google’s spider, Googlebot will eventually
come and index you site. Contrary to popular
believe once your site is indexed, there is
not need to resubmit your pages to Google,
even if you updated the pages. If, although
it is not necessary, you submit your website
to Google,
submit only the index page, it will find the
rest of the pages using the links anyway.
Altavista
Once
powerful, Altavista
started to loose grounds to other search engines
in a big way. Submitting to Altavista
is fairly simple! From the home page click on
the “Submit a Site” located at the
bottom of the page. There are two choices for
you: either you can choose the “Basic Submit”
service, which is free or for an immediate inclusion,
you can choose the “Express Inclusion”
service.
To
prevent automatic submission of URLs, on the
submission page Altavista
added submission code that has to be inserted
manually along with the URL. The Express Inclusion
service costs US $39 for the first URL for six
months.
AllTheWeb
This
search engine is becoming quite popular lately.
It has a very large database. AllTheWeb
has very sophisticated search functions like searches
for pages linked to a given page, searches within
URLs or page titles, and searches limited by page
size. It provides search results and technology
to Lycos
and Ebay.
Submission to AllTheWeb is quite easy. Use the
following link page to submit your URL: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_URL.php
If you need an express inclusion, you have to
use “Lycos InSite“ service of Terra-Lycos.
The rate is US $35 for a full year inclusion.
Teoma
If
you care about Teoma,
a much hyped search engine, which is actually
an additional search engine of Ask Jeeves, you
can use its paid inclusion program located at
http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp?id=30270.
It charges US $30 per year for first URL and
US $18 for additional each.
Inktomi
You
may not heard about Inktomi,
but many popular search engines use the results
from Inktomi
such as AOL,
Excite,
Go.com,
HotBot,
IWon,
Overture to name a few. For secondary search
result even MSN
uses it! Yahoo!
recently bought Inktomi.
Which means that very soon even Yahoo!
might give priority to the search results
coming from it. Inktomi
provides a paid inclusion service. Inktomi
sells its inclusion service exclusively through
its reseller partners. You can find them over
here: http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html
The fee is US $39 per URL for a year and US$25
for subsequent URLs.
