Making It Easy to Find Your Site

Getting Listed

The first step is to get listed in your favorite search engines. There are three ways to do this:

• Submit your Web address directly to the search engine for free.
• Get someone already listed to link to your site.
• Pay to have your site listed on one or more search engines.

Which you do depends entirely on the search engine you’re targeting. Obviously, the free option appeals to most people. To submit a site to Google, fill out the simple form at www.google.com/addurl .To submit a site to Yahoo!, go to http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html you’ll need to register for a Yahoo! account if you don’t already have one. To submit to MSN Search, use the form at search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. Submitting your site to the major search engines only takes a few minutes and is well worth the effort.

Downsides of Free Site Submission

Don’t expect your site to show up immediately in the search engine’s listings. It may take weeks before the search engine crawls (that is, inventories the pages of) your site. Or it may refuse your site for various reasons. Not all search engines let you submit sites for free. Some require either a one-time payment or a subscription in order to list your site. There may be different payment levels available, with the pricier levels guaranteeing more prominent placement of your site in the search engine’s results. Some sites, like Yahoo! and MSN, offer both free and paid submission options. Is it worth paying for getting listed? Not initially. Submit your site to the search engines using their free submission forms as soon as you have a few good pages of content available, and spend your time (and money) working on other aspects of the site. Wait until the site’s been running for a while and you’ve explored other avenues for increasing traffic. The other way to be listed by a search engine is to get an already indexed site to link to yours. Search engines periodically recrawl the sites in their indexes, looking for new content and new links. If one of these sites links to a page on your site, the crawler will eventually find its way to that page. Search engine will then be able to find your site’s home page and site map, and soon all your pages will find their way into the index. The trick, of course, is to get a link to your site on someone else’s site. If you know someone who already has an indexed site up and running, you can simply ask that person to link to your site. Getting your site mentioned in someone’s blog is an easy way to do it if your site has useful information that the blogger thinks would be of interest to his or her readers. Note that the quality of the links to your site is also importantmore on this shortly.

Getting listed in a Web directory like the original Yahoo! directory or the Google directory is another way to get into search engine indexes. (A directory is something like a phone book for Web sites.) For submissions to the Yahoo! directory, see the links near the bottom of the http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html page. The Google directory is actually based on the directory maintained by the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ or ODP, a Web-community effort. Getting listed is free, but it’s a more involved (and sometimes controversial) process see http://dmoz.org/add.html for more details.

The Big Three-

Add your URL to Google

Yahoo! Submit Your Site

Submit It!: MSN Search Free Submission

Determining Your Ranking

Each search engine arranges its search results in some manner. Complicated algorithms are used to determine which Web pages best match a given set of search terms. Search engine staff spend a lot of time tuning the algorithms in order to return the most relevant results possible to all kinds of queries. Even though the search service itself is free, it’s all about making money: The better the results, the more the search engine is used; the more the search engine is used, the more money the search engine company makes by selling related services. You don’t just want your site to be listed by a search engine; you want your pages to rank high in the search results. Being ranked in the top ten sites for a given keyword is a surefire way to generate traffic for your site, especially if you can nab the first or second spot on the list. Of course, every other site owner wants the same thing, so you’ll face stiff competition to get one of those prized rankings. How search engines rank individual pages is a matter of great debate among Web site owners. For competitive reasons, search engines rarely disclose more than vague details about their page-ranking algorithms. Even the famous PageRank formulathe one that determines a site’s popularity by counting the number of other sites that link to itis just a small (though important) part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

Easy and Quick Ways to Get Free Traffic

Don't have the time or patience for traffic exchanges? Try one of these. You place a code on your blog or site and you receive traffic.

When you put a link box like this on your site, it will display others links. That gives you credits and your link is then displayed as well. You can customize the link box to match your blog or site. They have a tutorial on the site.