Internet studies have shown that over eighty-five percent of the four hundred million internet users use search engines on a daily basis when they are surfing the web. Having your web site listed in a popular search engine is not sufficient, to stand out in the crowd, it have to be ranked high enough, so that when a user performs a search, it will be listed on the first results page.

Internet promotion can be broken down into three main sections: submission, optimization and placement. Search engine submission or registration refers to the process of getting your web site listed on the search engines. This process simply notifies the search engine of the existence of your site. Search engine optimization refers to the act of altering your site to the extent where it will rank well for particular terms or keywords. Search engine placement, positioning or ranking is mainly based on the terms or keywords that one wish to associate their site with. For example, Circuit City will definitely want their website to rank well with any terms related to electronics and computers. The ultimate goal for many people is to get into the “top ten” ranking for a particular keyword or search terms.

Most of the search engines allow webmasters to submit their sites for free. However, all these search engines can be “bribed” to move the listing process faster. A minimum marketing budget of around five hundred dollars should be sufficient when promoting a newly established commercial website. Non-commercial sites can usually get submitted for free, however it requires more time and work on the webmaster’s part.

Directory Submission
Yahoo! charges 299USD for consideration to their commercial categories in their directory. It is very important for a website to be listed in Yahoo’s directory as that will ensure crawlers from Altavista, Excite, Hotbot and Yahoo will learn about your site and visit it. Another important directory is LookSmart as they provide the main listings used by MSN search. Their small business program, LookListings Small Business charges 49USD for consideration. Last but not least, The Open Directory is a volunteer-built guide to the web. Being listed with the Open Directory is essential as it is used by many major search engines such as Altavista, Aol Search, Google, Lycos, MSN Search and Netscape. While the submission is absolutely free, the bad news is there is no paid option and there is no guaranteed turnaround time to getting an answer as to if you are accepted.

Crawlers Submission
Crawler-based search engines visits web pages periodically to update their listings. Getting your web site listed on the three directories mentioned above will guarantee your site to be listed with all the major crawler-based search engines too. Unlike directories, crawler-based search engines will treat each individual page as an entry; therefore one is likely to have several pages from the same site listed.

Submitting to these crawlers are free, but there is no guaranteed turnaround time of getting listed. However, it is always a good idea to submit your url to these crawlers once a month until you get listed. Submitting too frequently is not recommended as it will be considered as spam by most of the crawlers and they will put a block on your website for a period of time. Google, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, Teoma and Altavista are five of the more popular crawlers that are essential to the promoting of your site.

That’s it to the basics of search engine submission. Once you followed the tips as mentioned above, you will be receiving traffic from search engines. However, if your site is optimized, you are likely to receive even more traffic. Search engine optimization will be covered in the next newsletter. In the meantime, you should start submitting to all the search engines!