Getting Listed in the Search Engines

In the previous topic, I discussed what a Search Engine is and what Web Spiders do.  In this topic, I'll cover the importance of submitting your site to the major Search Engines to help your search rankings.

Search engines and directories average more than 300 million searches a day and are the main way Internet users find Websites. If you want Web users to find your Website, then you want to be listed with the major search engines. 

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, over 80 percent of Internet users use the top three search sites: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines.

Web spiders "crawl" the Internet constantly and make the rounds on a regular basis, usually about once a month.  In doing so, they update an engine's database of sites, so in time, your site should eventually be listed.  But to maximize your chances of getting in a search database and to make this happen as soon as possible, you should submit your site to the major search engines (this is like a request to be "crawled" by a spider). The big three search sites have forms for submitting Web addresses at no cost.

Some sites will respond to your request by sending a spider to index your Website almost immediately, but generally it will take several weeks or a month or more.  If you are willing to pay for better service, many search engine sites offer a quick response in a few days for a fee.

Be sure to read the rules for each search engine before submitting your URL.  You can resubmit your URL to a search engine site more than once, but some search sites will penalize you if you submit it too often.  Why would you want to submit your URL more than once?.  Because some search engines will not update their listings when you update your content.  Consider resubmitting your Website every 4 to 6 weeks.

If you don't want to do the submitting on your own, there are numerous Submission Services that will submit your site to multiple search engines for a fee.  Some Web hosting providers will offer a regular submission service as part of their agreement when you sign up to have them host your Website.

A WORD of CAUTION:

Just because you get your site submitted to the major search engines and are able to confirm that a spider has crawled your site, don't assume that you are done - if your goal is to receive high search rankings.

Getting listed (also called indexed) by the search engines is just the first step in having a high ranking Website.  Besides Keyword and On-Page Optimization that you can perform to increase the ranking of your Web pages,  the NUMBER ONE thing that will have the biggest impact on your search rankings is to have a large number of inbound links from other Quality Websites pointing to your pages. This is called Off-Page Optimization.

In fact, if you can get a link from a webpage with a PR (PageRank) of 6 or higher, it's likely that your site will be indexed by the search engines in a couple of weeks. If you can get a link from a PR3 or PR4 page, then you should be indexed within a few days.  Compare this to submitting your site to the search engine by yourself, which might take several months before you are listed.

I'll explain PageRank in the topic on Link Building for SEO, and how to get links to your site in the topic on Link Trading.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google has a lot of good information for Web developers to help in getting your site listed and ranked.  You can check it out at Information for Webmasters. (http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html) They also have a section called "Quality Guidelines," which outlines some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed from the Google index.

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.  Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
2. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
4. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
5. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
6. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
7. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
8. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
9. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Search Engines for your Consideration:

There are hundreds of search engines on the web.  The following is just a small list to give you an idea of some of the more popular Search Engines.

In the next topic on Search Engine Optimization, I'll give you pointers on how to optimize your site so you can get the best ranking possible.