1000 search engines for $5.
By
Vishal Sampat
How many times have you got an email saying that your website
will be listed in 1000 search engines for $50? Have you ever subscribed
to it? And if you have actually subscribed for it, please let
me know if it ever worked. cause it has never worked for me. I
have spent endless hours searching for 1 service that actually
gives results for $5, but alas found none.
The other advert that used to fascinate me is "Automatic
programs for search engine submissions". Most of them appear
quite cheap and promise listing in around 1000-2000 engines. After
you buy them you will realize most of these engines are ones you
haven't even heard of and probably get lesser hits than your web
site.
So why do these people promise a listing? Well, what they promise
most of the time is a listing in engines. and not a top listing.
Also what they guarantee is a top listing in unknown engines.
which for all you know don't even get visitors. Listings in top
engines like google, AltaVista, etc require much more than an
auto submission done by using the programs available or by using
these run of the mill $5 services. Most search engine specialists
will tell you subscribing to these services wont show you an improvement
of even 10%.
So what do you do to get your site a good listing on a search
engine? After all according to statistics more than 85% of the
traffic an average site generates comes from search engines. Below
I have listed 10 basic methods which will help you get listed,
or improve your listing in most major search engines.
1. Concentrate on the top 20 engines. The rest don't matter.
2. Optimize your meta tags & meta description. Identify the
most important words or search quotes used by your potential clients
and add them to your meta tags & description. Don't add general
unrelated terms in your tags. Its considered spamming. Your description
should also include the important key words.
3. Manually go to each engine, read policies & submit your
URL. Most engines require only your main page to be submitted,
however for better listing, some engines like AltaVista allow
multiple pages to be submitted. However most engines have a limit
for the number of pages to be submitted. Don't submit more than
the limit allows you to. its considered spam.
4. Use select doorway pages. Doorway pages are pages, which are
not a part of the primary site but are later added primarily to
improve listings in search engines. These are useful especially
if your primary site contains a lot of Flash pages, which cannot
be rendered by search engine spiders. Be selective in using doorway
pages, and please see to it that the doorway pages have useful
not just a garble of keywords and a link taking the surfer away.
If found such pages are blacklisted by most searchengines.
5. Take time out to study your competition. Make a note of various
search terms which result in their site popping up. Make sure
to include these in your pages which optimizing them for engines.
6. Have a robots.txt file in the root directory. This is the first
file most search engine spiders look for. This file specifies
which robots are unwelcome and which directories, if any, are
out of bounds for robots.
7. While putting in invisible text at the end of pages or stuffing
a page with keywords and providing auto redirect to other pages
helped in the PAST. its not true anymore. While some important
search engines can detect invisible text by matching the page
background colour with the text colour and they tend to blacklist
the page, nearly ALL engines can recognize aut redirect tags &
trust me having them will NOT improve your rankings.
8. Some search engine specialists suggest cloaking as a good option
for improving engine rankings. Yes. if done CAREFULLY & skillfully
it will help boost rankings; personally I am against it on the
grounds of it not only being unethical but also very dangerous.
Search engines DISLIKE cloaking.
9. Exchange links with other sites. Having more sites linking
to you will definitely boost your rankings as many of the new
generation algorithms which engines use count the number of incoming
links to the site.
10. Review & carefully follow ALL the rules before submitting
to web directories, especially YAHOO & DMOZ. Yahoo is arguably
the single most important directory to be listed in and certainly
one of the toughest. Yahoo charges an annual fee for a listing
in most commercial categories and that too doesn't guarantee a
listing. Hence, READ & CAREFULLY FOLLOW every rule that is
mentioned on the yahoo submission page before you submit to Yahoo.
Hope you liked my 10 golden guidelines for search engine submissions.
Follow them before you submit to engines and be sure to drop me
a mail or visit my website http://www.convonix.com
if you would like me to submit your site for you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vishal Sampat has been coding web sites since the last four years.
He has been web master for http://www.khopcha.com
and also is the cofounder of Convonix Inc. Currently pursuing
bachelors of Engineering in Bombay Univ. he codes pages and studies
search engine submissions in his extra time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------