What you need to know for website submitions.

Having your website listed on search engines is an major part of having success on the internet. Most web surfers start their online searches at one of the major search engines/directories available. Next they may try specialty search engines, and finally follow links from other websites or links from newsletters or e-zines they may receive. So you can see how important getting listed and listed ahead of your competition is important.

You should have a sense of urgency to get your website listed now while it is still free to do so. More and more of the major search engines are converting, at least partially, to a pay-per-listing or pay-per-click format. Taking advantage of all the free advertising a good search engine placement can give you today will be very valuable for the future of your business.

Getting listed is a good start, but you also need to get listed near or at the top of the results pages generated by the search engines. Conventional wisdom is that if you are not listed in the first 30 spots, you might as well not be listed. The problem is every major search engine looks at different things on your site to come up with your rank, so there is no magic bullet to get the best ranking. The best you can do is have good, related content and don't do anything unethical when submitting your site (like key word spamming).

Ok, as promised, here are some tips on how to optimize your pages for higher search placement:

• Make sure the title of your page has "key" words in it. Key words are words a surfer might use to find web site like yours. Most search engines will take your title into consideration.
• Use META Tags: These are HTML tags that go in the Heading of your page. The most useful ones are "description" and "keywords"e Meta tags. For more information on these Click here to visits W3C. Just scroll down a bit to see examples of these.
• Nothing beats good content: Use as many keywords as you can, while still making gramatical and editorial sense. In other words, you need lost of text filled with as many keywords as you can comfortably put in your writting. Your Key word density (the percentage of key words vs. other words) will be very important in your website ranking. Keep in mind, if you have a website with lots of pictures and no text....you are not going to get a good ranking. You must have words on your pages, the more the better.

  The top searched for words on the net. Click here for your FREE report !

• Ok, having said what I did about pictures above: You can use your graphics to add key words on your web pages. When you add a graphic to a page, your use the IMG tag. Inside that tag you can add an ALT= qualifier. so if your enter: Alt="Text here", the words you enter between the quotes will appper on the screen when a visitor puts their cursor on the image. Just remember to do it inside the IMG tag. Go ahead, try it, put your cursor on any image on this page, you will see my added key words. Again, remember to make gramatical sense.

In my Internet business information Newsletter, I will from time to time include articles on the latest changes and information on how to list well on search engines. All the information will be battle tested before published. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of this page.

Now, let's talk about automating your web site submittions. You can certainly visit each of the major search engines and submit your website manually. Alot of web marketers belive that is the best way to guarantee a listing, and for places like Yahoo and About.com, that is certainly true (well for yahoo, you also need about $300 for them to Look at your site). You may want to automate your website submitting for every other search engine and directory.

Below, I have listed submitting software that offer free trial downloads. These are the SAME software packages that alot of so-called expert submittion services use for their customers. You can pay someone thousands of dollars, over and over again to submit your site for you, or you can do it yourself. Give it a whirl, it is kinda fun to do it yourself:

Click here to return to index list.