Submit Web Site To Search Engine

     Now that you have made your own web site, you expect someone to look at it, right? How will they find you? Now, is clearly the time to send out invitations. The fastest and easiest way to do that is through the Search Engines.

     Once you buy a domain name, you'll get email, snail mail and phone calls from people wanting to sell you various internet services. Some services are worth it, some aren't. Knowing the difference is valuable information.

Submit to free search engines

     Some services want you to pay $30-80 to submit your web site to search engines. Apparently, people must buy this because I've been receiving these notices (bills?) for years. You can easily do this yourself in a few minutes for free.

     If search engines charged to list your site, they wouldn't have nearly as much information listed as they do. The more web sites they list, the better for them and us.

     Search engines make money from their output, not from your input. The real power of the search engines, is sorting through the huge amount of information and providing searchers with the best information. Your website could be that information.

     If you are really patient, your web site will eventually be listed in the search engines, whether you do anything or not. Search engine spiders have a single task, to find and crawl your page.

... but, you can do much better than that!

     Once you have been found by search engines, they come back regularly to see changes to your web site. Most search engines take a few weeks to list your web site, after all, there's a long line. Paid submissions usually involve moving to the head of the line, or some type of guaranteed search engine ranking.

Easy Submission to Search Engines

     There are a couple of different ways to deal with search engine submissions. There is the easy way, and a more permanent way. Both methods work quite well, but in different ways. Let's start with the easy way.

90% of web site traffic comes from about 5 search engines

     The following sites are some of the best. Some of them are free submission, some are paid submission and still others are both pay and free submission. I've included some brief notes about affiliations between different search engines. These affiliations can change quickly.

Did You Get Your Website On Google Search Yet?

     How do you know if your website is listed yet? Finding yourself in a search engine can be tough, unless you are at the top. You may be disappointed if you expect to top the list first time out. Besides, you'll rank differently for different words and phrases.

     My simple solution to this problem? Put the entire web site name at the bottom of the web page. Using this page as an example:

www.makemyownwebpage.com/TellWorld.php
     This provides unique text, and you really should be in the top ten search engine results. It also provides your visitors a return path to find your web page again.

     Now, when you run your search, use quotation marks like this:

"www.makemyownwebpage.com/TellWorld.php"
     Normally, the search engines look for every word, in any combination. The slashes and dots are often percieved as spaces, which makes your webpage address look like several words. With quotes, you have defined your search as an exact phrase. Quotes can make a huge difference, like millions versus 3 results.

     That should nail down first place, so if your page isn't shown in the search results, then it probably hasn't been listed yet. Just wait for about a week or two, then resubmit.

Sitemaps - Search Feed

     Search engines have a huge job. They need to look and record every single webpage, on every single website on the internet. Then, come back regularly to see if anything has changed.

     With billions of web pages, this task is not only daunting, but takes a lot of time. The result to us?

Our website changes could take weeks to appear in the search engine results! Unless we use...

     ...the Sitemap.xml file to help solve this problem. Most search engines give priority to websites using a sitemap, including search engines you didn't even realize existed. They can simply look over your sitemap, then, only look (or crawl) the webpages that you indicate have changed. It saves Google a ton of time, and if we all did it, we'd get listed a lot sooner.

     The Sitemap.xml file can save you a bunch of time too. Essentially, it is a list of files on your site. Each file is dated at the last update. This way, the large search engines can simply read your Sitemap.xml file to see what else to look at.

     Here is a sample of the Sitemap.xml file. The highlighted section is repeated for every web page in your web site (with a different address). Most of the parameters should be self explainatory, but just in case, you can always go to sitemaps.org for more details.

Sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">     <url>          <loc>http://www.nampa.net/index.php</loc>          <lastmod>2010-08-18</lastmod>          <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>          <priority>0.8</priority>     </url>     ...     ...     ... </urlset>

robots.txt?

     Once you have built your Sitemap.xml file, how would anyone know? The simple answer is the robots.txt file.

     Virtually every search engine looks for the robots.txt file. It's job is to tell the search engines what to look at and what to ignore. It's quite simple to add your new Sitemap.xml file to the list of things to look at.

robots.txt

# robots.txt for http://www.nampa.net/ User-agent: * Allow: / Disallow: /outlinks/ # Outgoing Links Sitemap: http://www.nampa.net/Sitemap.xml

Permanent Search Engine Submission

     Once we have the Sitemap.xml and robots.txt file created and installed on our site (root directory), then we can tell the search engines about their existance. Both Google and Yahoo allow site feeds. For your security, you need to sign up for a free account and install a verification code on your website.

Google Webmaster Resources. Under Site Configuration, select Sitemaps. Also, look at Robots.txt.

Yahoo - Submit Select 'Submit Site Feed'.

     Once you take a look at these Webmaster Tools, you'll realize they have a ton of good information. It does take a few days to accumulate enough information to show you anything.

     Search Engine algorithms aren't simple. If you've built in good site content, you'll often discover you rank well for phrases you didn't actually write. They often use synonyms and mis-spellings. Webmaster tools show your search ranking for various phrases quite easily. How cool is that?

Meta Search Engines

     Sometimes one search engine gives better results than another. Other times, the other search engine does better. Wouldn't it be great if we could get the best of several search engines from a single source? Well, meta search engines do just that!

     Meta search engines are nice for those of us who submit to search engine sites. The meta search engine shows us our placement in several sites at once.

I Need Hits - Paid Inclusion Search Results Sooner

Paid inclusion?

     Paid inclusions allow your site to take cuts to the beginning of the search engine waiting list. This ensures the listing is included much sooner, days instead of weeks. Different services have different levels of inclusion.

Purchase web site traffic?

Speed Pay Per Click

     Pay per click submissions are becoming very popular. They charge you per click, usually by your bid. This ensures high search engine ranking for your keyword preference (Sponsored sites). You only pay for the visitor that visits you.

     If you purchase web site traffic, you are guaranteed high search engine ranking. This may seem expensive. It can be, if our cost exceeds our income. If the cost is small and the income is great, this can be the best business move you ever made.

     When we purchase web site traffic, we are usually paying a few pennies per click. We are not usually paying for projected clicks. I would do some statistics on my site first to determine the average money I can expect my visitors to drop at my site. I would test this per visitor. If the visitor average is 12¢ and you pay 6¢ to the search engine for that visitor, then it's a good deal. If you are losing money on each customer, volume would be a bad idea.

     Do it right the first time. A PPC campaign can be time-consuming and boring. If you want to make money, you need to track a lot of things. Things like click-through rates and conversion-rates make the difference when it comes to profit. Use a guaranteed tool that automates most of the project.

Congratulations

     Well, at this point you should be saying "I can make my own web page!" You have done your marketing (if it is a profit site), selected an address for your site, built your web site and listed it on the search engines.

     Does this mean you're done? Well, if you are running a site for personal or presence, then maybe. If you are running a site for profit, the work is never done. At least not completely.

     Marketing is an ongoing process. You need to watch what is going on with your web site now. Watch the visitors come in. Find out where they are coming from using your server logs. You should be watching where your visitors exit. Are they just disappearing or are they using your profitable links?

     If your site is for profit, you should always have two goals. You should always try to increase search engine traffic and get more visitors to buy your products. If you do one, your profits will go up proportionately. If you do both, your profits go up exponentially. Exponentially is so much better!