Using Search Tools to Promote Your Website  pwp home  >   Reference Library  >   Next Steps  >  Using Search Tools to Promote

A website not listed on search tools is like an unlisted phone number; no-one will find it unless someone tells them about it. But it takes time and some effort to submit your site properly; leave yourself a full afternoon at least. And be patient; you'll find that some search engines will list your site immediately, but most don't work this way.

Search tools differ in the way they collect and present information:

Deep Search Engines (robots, worms, spiders): Robots use a program to search, catalog, and organize information on the Internet. They visit Internet resources and take key information from them which users can then search. Each engine does this differently and produces different results. A robot can only follow links. It finds pages in two ways: by visiting pages it's been told about and by following links from other pages. When the robot visits a page it processes it, then follows first internal, then external links. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the robots will get to your site eventually. Register it. Normally, all you'll need to do is fill in your URL. To put your page high on results lists you tailor your page, as we'll discuss.

Standard Search Engines: Standard engines are usually directories of Internet resources which can then be searched. Directory search engines don't look for sites; they get the information from people who enter it into the search engines database. They then look at the website and get different things and produce different results depending on the engine. This makes the standard search engines the focus of your attention when considering your promotion strategy.

Hierarchical databases present information in 'categories'. Place your page in the most relevant category where you think people will look for your product. Yahoo! started as a hierarchical database and added a search engine. Some say 70% of a site's hits originate with Yahoo!.

Guides: Guides are special directories that provide additional information in the form of a review, and sometimes include a rating of the Internet resource. Some Guides also present awards or badges of honor to particularly noteworthy sites.

You can submit your site to search tools in a number of ways:

Generic form-based services, usually free one-stop promotion. Fill in their form with the details of your page, then their robot goes off and enters this generic information into a dozen of the more popular search engines. There's no feedback and generic information may mean disappointing results. These are OK if you have a home page on which you've spent little time, have no wish for a large audience, or don't want to spend time manually submitting. Try to avoid making multiple submission to the same site. But because each search engine requests different kinds and quantities of information, if you have invested time and effort in your website, or want a wide audience, you should tailor your submission to meet each search engine's requirements.

Manual, tailored submission: The sites that do this for you always charge. I'm going to show you how to do it yourself. If you've got an afternoon, you can save the bucks.

Preparing Your Page: You want the search engines to list you at the top of search results, and you want to convince humans that your page is worth visiting.

Keywords: Imagine that you're looking for your type of product. Think of all the words which bear a resemblance to your topic and list all them, in order of priority. Use plurals, not singulars. Avoid very common words like the, web, service, etc., which are ignored. If one of your keywords is suspect, test it in a search engine.

Descriptions: Prepare a short (25 words or less) description and a long one (around 100 words). Answer the user's question "What's in it for me?". Words like information, help and free are good. Pack as many of your most powerful keywords into the description as possible, but make sure it makes sense. Some engines want you to put your web site into a classification category.

Title: Robots consider the Title of a page (the caption which appears on the title bar of your browser) to be the best description of its content; make your document title short and clear include a few powerful keywords. Add specific keywords to each sub-page title.

<META> tags: Only certain engines recognize META tags, but these are some important ones. You can tell them how to display your page in their results list (description) and also 'inject' keywords straight into the robot's brain (keywords). You're allowed up to 200 keywords. Don't repeat the same keyword a lot; the whole group may be ignored nowadays. Restrict your META description to 150 characters (not words), including spaces. Your <META> text should appear in the <HEAD> part of your document, like this:

<HEAD>    <TITLE>Title</TITLE>    <META Name="description" Content="Write your description here">    <META Name="keywords" Content="Write your keywords here"> </HEAD>

Body: The deep search engines sort pages in order of the density of keywords in the document. To give the META-disabled deep engines a chance, either make sure your keywords appear in the first paragraphs on your page, or copy the META keyword list or description (minus the tags) as the first text following the BODY tag and enclose it in <!-- -->. DON'T saturate your document with invisible keywords enclosed in comment tags or printed in the background color so they can't be seen. Search engine administrators actively penalize pages that use this method. Consider putting your site in a sub-directory to have a keyword in your URL.

Put it together: Put all this on a text page using Notepad. Arrange it like this:

Title:
URL:
Short description:
Long Description:
Keywords: (Arrange in order of importance)
Categories: (Order of importance)

Make sure that the information is presented in a way that you can copy and paste it conveniently from your editor to the submission form. Edit and proof read this data carefully.

Now do it: Ideally, your page should be letter perfect before you even consider uploading it in the first place because once the robot or directory has visited, that's how your page will appear in the database until it visits again, which can be a long time. Keep a notebook of what you do and when regarding submissions. You may need to submit again to a site if it doesn't list your site after a reasonable period of time. You may decide to use one of the free multiple submission or promotion sites (see above). If you're manually submitting, submit to all the robots first. These are the quickest to submit to and you want to get in front of their next search as soon as possible. A robot will want only the URL of your web site, like this: http://www.moonlake.net/clinic/design.htm.

Next, submit to the directories and then to the guides. Find the engines which cover the special niche that includes your type of site and submit your site to them. Directory-type sites will generally want the URL, the Title, a description, classification categories, and some keywords. Take this from your text page. In the 'Comments' box paste your short description first, followed by your list of keywords in upper or lowercase if you're allowed to. Yahoo! won't let you list your keywords, so work your most powerful words into the caption and description. Always fill in the 'Additional Categories' section.

Here are some popular search engines:

Standard:
Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com
Open Text http://www.opentext.com
Starting Point http://www.stpt.com
WWW Yellow Pages http://www.mcp.com:80/nrp/wwwyp/
EINET Galaxy http://www.einet.net/galaxy.html

Deep:
Alta Vista http://www.altavista.digital.com
WebCrawler http://www.webcrawler.com
Excite http://www.excite.com
Lycos http://www.lycos.com
HotBot http://www.hotbot.com/index.html
Magellan (your site has to be very good to get listed here) http://www.mckinley.com
Google www.google.com