PART 6

Search engine submissions

Search engine submission continues to be a part of the search engine marketing trade, although not as important as it once was.

Most search engines prefer finding your webpages on their own. However, letting the search engines know about new sites and pages does not hurt, as long as you don't overdo it.

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Don't worry too much about submitting your sites to the search engines. If there are other sites linking to you, they will find you.

Buying your way to the top

You may actually buy a top placement in search results, not in the regular search results, that is, but in special section of the result pages allotted to such text ads ("sponsored results").

There are a large number of search engines providing such services, the major ones being Yahoo! Search Marketing/Overture and Google AdWords.

The amount you have to bid to get to number 1 varies from keyword phrase to keyword phrase, as does the minimum bid. If you think the major ones are too expensive, you may first test your skills at one of the smaller pay per click search engines. Kanoodle will, for instance, give you 5 US$ worth of clicks for free.

Andrew Goodman of Traffick has written a fine introduction to Google AdWords, an ebook that also includes some general advice that might be used when submitting pages to all pay per click search engines.

Pandia has a separate resource page for pay per click search engines.

From the Lost Apocrypha of Search Engine Marketing:

"Holy Moses! What kind of machine is this?" Phillipus Fogg exclaimed.

"This is my new steam powered search engine," Leonardo von Edison explained.

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Write your question on a piece of paper, and put it into this compartment. The search engine will then search its archives in order to find an answer to your question."

"And who puts the answers into the machine in the first place?" Fogg asked.

"I call them my little spiders," von Edison answered."I have 498 messenger boys running around in the Kingdom taking notes. These notes are put into the machine. I also get quite a few search engine submissions -- Spam mostly."

"All right, my friend - let's test this machine of yours!" Fogg wrote down a few words on a piece of paper and gave it to von Edison.

"'Where is my wallet?'" von Edison read. "No, no, no! You must be more precise and give it keywords that can help it sort out your problem. Let's see: 'Where is the wallet of Phillipus Fogg, Esquire, 45 Oxford Road?' Now, that's better. Let's put your question into the machine and wait for a reply. It should only take a couple of hours."

Finally von Edison tore off the paper containing the search engine's answer. "The wallet of Phillipus Fogg is in the pocket of Mister Frederick Appleby, Stoke upon Trent," von Edison read. "That can't be right," he added nervously.

"Damned!" Fogg exclaimed and looked in his pockets, "I should have known that I could not trust that fellah'!"

Submitting Sites

Here is the good news: Sites that are already represented i a search engine index need not submit their pages on a regular basis. As long as there is a link between a page already in the search engine index and the new page, the search engine will find it.

(That does not guarantee its inclusion, however, but that is another matter.)

If you have a new site it may make sense to submit its home page to the search engines -- while at the the same time getting a few inbound links from sites that are already included.

There are many software programs and online tools for submitting your webpages automatically to search engines. You should use these with the care, as more and more search engines punish excessive submissions.

AltaVista used to claim that as much as 98 percent of submissions entered at its Add URL page are spam, including links to irregular doorway pages or from webmasters adding an extreme amount of webpages daily.

Submission tools

You should normally submit pages to the major search engines by hand. If you manage a large number of websites you may, however, find it useful to use software that submits Web pages for you (like Web Position Gold).

You may use Pandia's search engine submission resource page when submitting manually. It contains links to relevant search engine submission forms, help files, pay per click and paid inclusion services and more.

The most important search engines are Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Also submit your site to Ask and Wisenut, and any major Non-American search sites that are relevant to your audience.

If you have a large site, and want to make sure that Google identifies all your pages, you may use Google Sitemaps, a system whereby you submit a text file containing links and descriptions of all your pages. This requires some more work, though!

Search engines vs. search sites and portals

Please note the difference between a search engine and a search site. A search engine is the database that delivers search results, a search site is the website that lets you search this database. Some search engines are used by many search sites.

There are now only four major search engines left: Google, the Yahoo! Search Engine, MSN and their little brother Ask.

To make things confusing, most search sites also present results from search directories (i.e. catalogs of sites hand picked by human editors, cf. the Yahoo! Directory or the Open Directory). This is why some search engines will ask you to submit your site to the directory as well as to the search engine.

Most search sites and metasearch sites will add links from fee-based pay-per-click search engines.

Do not resubmit listed pages!

Some experts recommend that you resubmit you pages on a monthly (or even weekly) basis. Don’t! The search engines may consider this spam and give your pages a lower ranking.

If the page is listed, leave it alone. Only resubmit if you have made substantial changes to the page. Even then it can often be better to wait and let the search engine find out by itself.

Script generated pages

Please note that search engines are having difficulty indexing dynamic database or script generated pages with URLs including signs such as “&” and “?” (generated by Perl CGI scripts).

The reason for this is that they are afraid the spider will get lost in an endless loop generating thousands of pages.

Fortunately, the search engines are getting better at this now, and the only type of URLs they really hate, are those that include a session ID.

Search engines will index active server pages (.asp), server side includes (.shtml), and Cold Fusion pages (.cfm) without difficulty.

Checking your ranking

The time it takes for search engines to revisit your site and refresh their database will vary. Normally it takes from two to six weeks.

There are two main exceptions to this general rule:

If you update your site frequently, a search engine like Google may consider it newsworthy and start crawling it more often, normally every 48 hours. This may even get you a small boost in the rankings.

If you pay to get included through one of the various paid inclusion programs, you will also be revisited once every one to two days. Paid inclusion will, however, not get you a boost in rankings.

The good thing about being revisited frequently is that you may evaluate the effect of your search engine optimization efforts much sooner, which gives you more room for experimentation. If your new coding does not work out, you may return to your old version more quickly, without loosing significant amounts of traffic.

If you have a site with a large number of pages, or many sites, checking your ranking for all relevant keyword phrases, may be very time consuming.

Search engine submission and ranking software

This is where the search engine submission and ranking software packages actually becomes useful. They will search the various search engines for you, and produce easy to read reports on search engine positions and trends.

Be careful, though, and do not overdo it. Search engines like Google do not like that webmasters make use of costly bandwidth in this way. Hence spread your number of request over a reasonable period of time (some search engine submission packages will do this for you), and reduce the number of keyword phrases to be checked.

Among the most well known search engine ranking software solutions are Web Position Gold, and AgentWebRanking.

Where to go from here

Reading this guide is only the beginning. Now you should go on to read more detailed introductions to search engine marketing.

We have already recommended popular ebooks on the trade, including Planet Ocean Communications' Unfair advantage book on winning the search engine wars and Mike Grehan's ebook on Search Engine Marketing.

You will find more book reviews in our sections on search engine positioning books and search engine promotion ebooks.

Then you should subscribe to the most important newsletters on search engine optimization, Pandia's own search engine newsletters included.

You may also keep track of search engine developments by reading various online search engine news columns. Our own search engine news section include links to SE news sources and weblogs from all over the world.

Another way of staying up to date and getting help is following the discussions in one of the Web's many search engine marketing forums. One of our favorites is Webmaster World.

Time is money. It could be that you cannot afford to spend too much time on doing your own search engine optimization work. If this is the case, you must get in touch with a search engine optimization company. Use the knowledge you have gained through reading this tutorial to sort out the charlatans.

You can find more concrete hands on advice on search engine marketing and optimization in Pandia. See also our search engine resource section.

Contents

1 Search Engine Marketing 101
2 Selecting Search Keywords
3 Search Engine Friendly Code
4 Search Engine Friendly Webdesign
5 Link Popularity
6 Search Engine Submissions

More on search engine marketing

Pandia's search engine ranking resources
Links to search engine optimization tools and resources
Feature articles on search engine optimization

See also our Goalgetter tutorial on how to search the Web

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