Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

Submitting your web site to search engines is the most important part of web promotion. You cannot afford to ignore search engines if you are serious about your Internet Marketing efforts. The following tips may make search engine submissions easier and more rewarding.

1. Target the Right Keywords

The first step is to determine the keywords that you want to target and prepare meta tags from them. Think of general words related to your business and make a list of them. Now you need to check if people are actually searching these keywords. Two very useful resources for checking searched keywords are:

The best way to go about this process would be to get a list of popular and related keywords from the Goto.com suggestion tool and then run them through the free trial offered by Word Tracker to identify keywords that you want to target.

Remember, the more specific a keyword, the lesser competition it would face. And the lesser competition a keyword has, the more chances that you would get higher rankings on it.

After finalizing the list of keywords you want to target, you must create the meta tags for these keywords. Your most important keywords must go in your title tag, along with your description and keyword tags. While the keyword tags are generally longer, the title and description tags are shorter and hence you would have to be comparatively choosy about their content.

Make sure that your most important keywords are also a part of the actual content of your web page, especially the first paragraph, as the search engines would index this, and it would contribute towards your keywords density.

2. Link Popularity

Sites that have their links in other web sites are also ranked highly by search engines. However, the site that has your link must have content similar to yours to give you a higher ranking.

There are many ways to increase your link popularity. You can do a search for your keywords and make a list of sites that rank highly on them. If these sites are not too closely competitive you can write to their webmasters and request a link exchange. You can also join various networking groups and exchange links with their members. Following are some groups dedicated to link exchanging.

3. Learn More About Search Engines

Understanding the way search engines work can be a tricky business. All search engines have different ways of ranking web sites listed within them. Some rank according to meta tags while others totally ignore the meta tags and focus only on the title tag and web page content. To make sense of it all, and to optimise you web pages so that they rank highly on all the important search engines, you may want to check out the following resources.

4. Automated Submissions

To save time you may want to check out the following tools for automated submissions. These tools would instantly submit your web site to some of the most popular search engines in a matter of seconds.

5. Required Information

To speed up the submission process you may want to keep the information required by search engines and directories handy. In general, search engines/directories require the following information:

You can type all this information in a text file and then simply cut and paste while you are submitting the site. The following software for filling forms would also prove useful.

6. Spread Sheets to Track Results

If you want to keep a track of the results of your submission efforts, you can create a spread sheet in MS Excel to help you with the process. The spread sheet may have the following sections listed horizontally:

Submitting to search engines is a time consuming process and it is important to do it right the first time. This would ensure that you get your fair share of traffic and the rankings that you deserve.