Search Engine & Directory Submissions

Search Engine Submissions

Listed in Google and the other popular search engines is one of the most effective ways of directing free, targeted traffic to your website.

There are a handful of search engines out there that bring traffic, but the reality is a very large percentage of search engine traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

So in other words, once you start getting traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN Live), you’ll rank well in the others automatically.

Free Submission

You can submit to all of the major search engines for free, but that won’t guarantee that your site will be picked up, or appear on any searches. Free submission only guarantees that the search engine knows the site exists.

To go the route of free submissions, look for a “Submit Your Site” link on the search engine site and fill out a submission form. Not to discourage you, but it can take up to 12 weeks for your site to be indexed.

Below you will find the 3 big search engine links for submitting your site… Google, Yahoo and Bing. You will also find these links at the end of this lesson.

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Submitting Your Site to Directories

Directories offer a way of collecting and categorizing links to other web sites. They are not search engines and behave nothing like search engines. For example, whereas a search engine collects entries using a search crawler or robot, search directories are populated by people. You enter your web site in a directory, and then the entry is reviewed by a real person before the site is included in the directory listings.

You must complete a submission process in order to have your site included in most directories. When you submit the information about your site, there is an art to doing it. How you list your site can mean the difference between the site being included in the directory or not. Before you even begin to create your listing, it’s usually a good idea to navigate through the directory to which you’re submitting your site. Look at other listing and take note of what works in them.

Keywords are of little importance when you’re creating your directory listing. Instead, what will make the difference is the content on your web site. Therefore, if you’re faced with listing in a directory that’s strict about reviewing sites before they are listed, make sure you have fresh content on your site.

Links can also be important when your site is being reviewed for inclusion in a directory, so be sure you keep your links updated. Broken links are typically detrimental to your site, and links that lead to unrelated pages won’t reflect well either.

Other elements that editors evaluate include the following:

Appropriate categorization
Accurate titles and descriptions
Title and descriptions relevant to the subject of the web site
Domain names that match site titles
Contact information that’s easily accessible
Links to privacy policies, return policies, and product or service guarantees
Working and appropriate links to other sites and resources

Increasingly, both search engines and directories are taking the actual code used to build the site into consideration when determining search results. It’s always a good idea to run your code through an HTML validator to ensure that it is free of errors and unnecessary elements. Clean code simply renders better and makes it easier for crawlers to navigate your web site.

More about HTML Validation below

In addition to these requirements, most directories have a long list of criteria that are reviewed before a site is actually added to the directory. That’s why it can sometimes take weeks or months for your site to be listed. Depending on the volume of submissions to the directory, it can be a slow process for editors to review each web site.

When you’re ready to submit your web site to a directory, take the time to completely read the directions provided by the directory. If you don’t follow these directions closely, it’s far more likely that your site will be rejected from the listings.

One other important submission guideline to remember is to submit only your site’s main page. When directories include sites that have been reviewed, they usually list the whole site as a single entry, rather than list each page separately, as search engines do.

Major Online Directories

One of the most well-known directories on the Internet is the Open Directory Project (ODP) managed by dmoz.org. This general directory is edited by a team of volunteers.

It is a representative of the various types of directories that are available for you to list your site with. Although there might be some slight differences, the directions of listing your site with ODP are very similar to those you would find when listing with other directories.

To list your Web site in the ODP directory, take these steps:

1. Navigate to the Open Directory Project web site at: http://www.dmoz.org/

2. Navigate to the category and subcategory where it would be appropriate for your site to appear. Then, in the top-right corner of the page, click Suggest URL.

3. You are taken to the submission site. Read all the instructions carefully and fill in the submission form completely.

4. When you’re finished filling out the form, click the Submit button. You’re taken to a thank-you page, and your submission process is complete.

5. Now you just have to wait for the editorial committee to complete its review. When the review is complete, you should receive notification indicating whether or not the site has been accepted and listed.

Like search engines, there are hundreds of different directories online. Some are general directories, whereas others are very specific and associated with only one industry or organization. When you’re selecting the directories to which you’d like to submit your site, be choosy. Don’t try to list your site in a directory that’s inappropriate, it will be a waste of your time and will most likely be rejected.

Here are some of the most well-known directories on the Web:

GoGuides.org at: http://www.goguides.org/addurl.html. This directory’s purpose is to be completely spam-free. It’s comprehensive search directory that even has image-searching capabilities. This directory has a one-time process fee of $69.95 and comes with a money back guarantee if your submission is declined.

SearchSight located at: http://searchsight.com/submit.htm is another general directory. SearchSight is one of the lesser-known directories, but it’s quickly gaining traction in the search market.

Paid vs. Free Directories

Many experts will argue that free directory listings have nothing of value listed in them. This is simply not true. Some free directories are actually very strict about the listings that are included in their results. Similarly, most users believer that paid directories automatically equate to better-quality sites. Again, not true.

Paid directories can be just as lax about the review process as any other directory. In both cases, whether free or paid is better for you, turns out to depend on your specific needs.

Submitting to RSS Syndication Directory Sites

This subject ‘RSS’ is two-fold… having an available RSS/Email feed for your followers, and submitting your site to RSS syndication directory sites! Having an available RSS/Email feed for your followers, will be covered in your final Lesson # 7 – “Getting Unlimited Traffic to Your Site!”

As for the other… an RSS feed directory is a location to where people can seek out content that they can use for their site or they can subscribe to. In order for people to find your site, you can submit your RSS feed to a place that will syndicate your blog content and give you more exposure.

Your RSS feed is usually your full URL with the word “feed” directly after the address. Example, mine would be http://seoblogoptimizer.com/feed/. When you submit your RSS feed to these sites, you will usually need to submit the URL of your RSS feed, plus a category that describes your site. Here is a fantastic listing of RSS feed sites. http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Using Site Submission Tools

Submission tools are automated software programs and applications that remember the repetitive information that must be provided in order to get your web site listed in a search engine or directory. They sound like a great idea… some are, but not all of them.

Many submission tools try to scam web site owners by promising to submit their site to thousands of search engines and directories for one low fee. The problem with that claim is that most of those search engines are either non-existent or mostly worthless to your site.

Therefore, when considering web site submission tools, look closely at the claims the programs make. Then apply that well-known rule: if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. You can ask for a list of the search engines and directories to which the program will submit your site. After requesting the list, take the time to research the sites before you invest in the tool.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know whether the submission tool you select will be the right one, so it is always the best practice to manually submit your site and URL’s to directories.

HTML Site Validation

Valid, properly written HTML allows search engines to easily read your web page content and underlying HTML code. Much like the English language, there is a right way and a wrong way to write the code that structures your web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and international group that works to develop protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web, has developed standards for HTML development. Web browser developers like Mozilla and Microsoft adhere to these standards to guarantee cross-browser uniformity when displaying web pages.

Search Engines read web sites line by line, and errors in your HTML syntax can trigger a penalty if the invalid code prevents the search-engine spider from reading the content. Invalid code can cause web sites to look different from browser to browser.

Use the W3C Markup Validation tool at: http://validator.w3.org/ to test your web page code for standard compliance. Just enter your web site URL in to the location bar, and the validation tool shows you any errors that your code contains and also gives suggestions to help you fix any problems.

You should make your best attempt to pass the validation test, but do not spend a great deal of time if it appears to be impossible. Many sites do not pass, including Google, Yahoo, and most other heavily visited Internet hot spots.

Search engines are unlikely to penalize your site for including invalid code unless it significantly hinders the capability of the search-engine spiders to read your web pages. W3C Markup Validation is primarily in place to ensure compatibility with all current and future technologies, and adhering to the W3C standards is likely to become more and more necessary if you want your web site to display properly on these devices.

Although it has not been proven to increase search-engine rankings, writing valid HTML is another weapon in an arsenal of best-practice techniques that are likely to have a cumulative effect on overall search-engine approval.

SEO Browser Tools & Plug-Ins

XML Site Map for WordPress Plug-in & Its Purpose

Considering that these lessons are based around the WordPress supported web site, I will cover the easiest way to get an XML site map for your site…. first, its purpose.

In 2005, Google introduced the XML sitemap format, and in 2006 it was adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. This gave publishers a standard format to follow for creating one sitemap that the top search engines could use. You can find specifics about the protocol at: http://www.sitemaps.org/.

Because blogs can become very large, a sitemap is often needed to ensure that the major search engines can locate, crawl, and index each individual web page. However, creating a sitemap by hand every time you make a new blog post gets very boring and redundant. Thankfully, there is a WordPress plug-in called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress that takes all the work out of maintaining an up-to-date sitemap.

Once the plug-in is correctly installed, your sitemap is automatically rebuilt each time you make a new post. Not only that, the plug-in also pings the major search engines to alert them that you have updated your sitemap and added new content. This should bring them to your newly added web page(s).

This plug-in makes getting your web site fully indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask incredibly easy. The more pages you have indexed, the more chances you have of being returned in the search results. This plug-in is free, and has consistently been updated to match each WordPress blogging software update. However, the developer does accept donation for his time and effort.

The Google XML SiteMap Generator is located at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/. Once you upload and activate the XML SiteMap Generator, click on the link “XML-Sitemap” under your Settings menu in your back office Dashboard. Once this page opens you will see that your sitemap has not been created yet.

Click on the link to create the sitemap, when it completes, navigate down the page adding or removing the information you would like, then click on the Update options button at the bottom… you are done! This will now rebuild your sitemap and ping the search engines that you have check marked, each time you create new content.

SEO for Firefox Browser Plug-in

One of the most popular SEO browser extensions is SEO for Firefox, which was created by SEO expert Aaron Wall. SEO for Firefox gathers multiple pieces of marketing data about a web site and displays that data within your browser along side the search results from the Google or Yahoo search engine.

To install this awesome Firefox extension, navigate to http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html.

A word of WARNING… if you have the SEO for Firefox toolbar on all the time, some of the search engines might start blocking some of your queries because they may think that you are scraping (scraping is the process, through computer software technique, of automatically collecting web information) them too much, because it pulls in a large amount of data from the different search engines.

To turn the SEO for Firefox toolbar off/on, single click the SEOBOOK name in the upper left corner of your browser window, then click the “Turn SEO Toolbar Off/On” link.

For additional information, please visit the article that I wrote about this SEO for Firefox plug-in found at http://seoblogoptimizer.com/seo-firefox-plugin/

The Google Toolbar Available for IE & Firefox

The Google toolbar is an add-on for both the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. The Google Toolbar includes several features that should prove useful during the various stages of SEO. These features include the Google PageRank of a web page, a tool to highlight a given keyword within a page (my favorite), and an auto fill option to cut down on the time spent typing the same information over and over again.

The Google Toolbar will allow you to highlight any word on a web page. You can insert a keyword or phrase into the Google Toolbar to quickly see where and how the keyword is used throughout the web page. The toolbar highlights the keyword wherever it appears, whether it’s in the headline, subheading, body copy, or internal links. It’s a great tool… I have used it on many occasions.

The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

The Alexa Toolbar allows you to perform competitive analysis and community research throughout your SEO campaigns. The Alexa Toolbar offers a shortcut to the information that is provided on the Alexa.com web site; you can effectively monitor your competitor’s web site and marketing campaigns by carefully evaluating an Alexa traffic graph provided through the Alexa Toolbar.

If you want to compete with other web sites for top rankings, you need to stay on top of what your competition is doing. You can also use the Alexa Toolbar to help you ask questions about traffic-generation strategies that may prove successful for your web site. The Alexa Toolbar offers data on related links, a list of sites that Alexa has grouped together as being related. Another tool worth its weight in gold.