Promote Your Website: Search Tools

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:

– Check to see if your website is already in the directory

– Write an objective description of your website

– Search out the specific subcategory from the directory hierarchy

– Follow the rules of submission as specified

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 Googles 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.