What You Should Know About Submitting to Search Engines and Indexes

If you need detailed information on search engines...

How do I get my site considered for listing with a search engine?

• Submit a request for your site to be reviewed or included in their index
• Example: AltaVista

How do search engines work?

• Most routinely spider Web sites to analyze a submitted site, keep the search engine current of discover new content.
• This information is stored in their index and use it to determine whether your web site matches a user's request--called the relevancy of your site.
• Search engines receive millions of submissions requests each week.
• Search engines have different ways to sort, weight and determine what sites to display for their users:

   

  • Google ranks sites based on popularity (# of external links that point to your site)
  • Yahoo is a directory or editorial site (humans add it to the index)
  • Infoseek automatically spider the content when you submit a site, assigns a ranking, and includes it in its index
  • Metacrawler and SavvySearch collect and represent the search engine content eliminating the advertisements
  • AskJeeves is a question based search engine and requires a personal email for submission to best place the sites to respond to a query

What can I do to be included in a search engine's index?

• Choose keywords carefully
• Thoroughly apply keywords in the text of the site
• Test the site's ranking often
• Never fool ("stuff") the search engine - repeating keywords over and over in the META tags, hiding text using cgi, using very tiny fonts, etc.
• Where to submit

How do I choose and apply keywords?

• Keywords are the two or three words that you use to identify your site to users.
• They are also the words in the HTML tags: TITLE, TEXT and META tags used in your document
• META description="displays this description when it is relevant to a search"
• META keywords="provides keywords for the search engine to associate with your page"

What are tips for applying keywords?

• Use keywords in TITLE of page.
• Provide relevant information and keywords on the first page of your site.
• If your title page is a graphic, use the ALT tag to place the title in the HTML.
• Apply keyword combinations and/or misspellings in the META tag.
• Use lower case for META tag keywords.
• Repeat the keywords in your content frequently.
• Use a clear description in your META tag.
• Graphics and image maps are ignored by search engines.

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