Thursday, September 18, 2008

Search Engine Submission – Getting the Basics Right

Search Engine Submission – Getting the Basics Right


Free listing is available with some major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and

Webcrawler. As stated earlier, even after submission of your website, a listing is not

guaranteed. Generally, it takes up to 2 to 3 months to be listed after submission. A recent

research concluded that the audience potential for websites submitted through free search

engines is about 39%.



Most search engines charge a nominal fee for every URL submitted. You are more likely

to get favorable results by submitting your website to a search engine with paid inclusion.

AskJeeves, Inktomi, AOL, and LookSmart are the most popular search engines in this

category. Once you submit your website with these Search Engines, your website is most

likely to be listed within a week. The Audience potential for paid search engines is 100%.



Search engines generally list pages of ten to twenty results per page. Most search items

will return thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of results. The key, however, is to get

listed amongst the top results if expect to get any traffic through these search engine

results.



There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines. One is to use Search

Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part of MSN Central. The fee

for submitting URLs using this service ranges from $79 to $299 per year. Another is to

submit your URL by submitting it individually to popular Search Engines and thus

avoiding the fee charged by submission services. The prevailing counsel is that manual

submissions should be made to the top five search engines or so and one could use

automatic submission services for the rest.



It is possible to submit your URL to search engines for free. At the same time, you have

to keep in mind that there are premium programs offered by some search engines that

assure listing or provide better positioning in ranking. Some use of paid listing programs

is recommended if you wish to receive serious traffic on your website from the search

engine. Paid Listing Programs are explained later in this chapter. Free submission could

result in much lower traffic, a low rank and positioning amongst the results returned, and

longer period of time before your website actually shows up in the results returned by the

search engine. Also there is no guarantee that your website would be included with these

free services. To avoid these issues some search engines offer “paid participation” that

guarantees high traffic and ranking for a fixed fee per year.

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