How to Register with Search Engines

There are thousands of search engines available for every type of Internet user, but a few major players that actually receive the most traffic. Your goal should be to submit your site to all of the largest search engines and then seek out specialized engines that may service your potential customer base.

Although many services promise to register your web site across the Internet the one way to make certain it's done properly is to do it yourself. We visited a sampling of the more popular search engines, listed the pages to visit to register your site (free) and provided summaries of their instructions. Before submitting your URL to these sites please review each sites policies and procedures.

Yahoo! - Goto http://yahoo.com/ and click on "Advertise With Us" to get information about their Express Inclusion program, which is $299 up front for consideration and $299 annually thereafter. Note that the "How to Suggest a Site" option does not apply to commercial sites so if you try to submit a site for your business, chances are you will be rejected.

AltaVista- http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl

AltaVista works much differently then Yahoo! because Altavista is not a directory. Instead of having an actual person visit your site like Yahoo! does, Altavista's automated system captures your URL and makes a determination if and how the site should be listed based on an automated reading of the content. This process could take months. AltaVista uses a full-text index. Every word on every page matters, and not just individual words, but the order of the words as well -- words combined as phrases. Creative use of this full-text search capability can produce very interesting and unexpected results.

For tips on making certain your web site is "well-indexed" by AltaVista, visit http://doc.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed.html for their tips.

Bottom line with AltaVista is that if you don't want all the background information, you can just go to the first url listed above and enter your web site address for submission. But be careful, because the first thing listed on that page is a fee-based submission process. Scroll down the page for the free listing.

Lycos InSite - is a suite of search marketing services that allows you to design and manage an integrated web site marketing campaign. Submit your site and generate highly qualified traffic using Paid Inclusion and Cost-Per-Click advertising programs at http://searchservices.lycos.com/searchservices/.

Google- http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Google assembles a list of submitted URL's for its automated system to crawl. Submitting your site does not guarantee a listing. Their process is similar to that of AltaVista's. While Google offers a range of services for webmasters and web site designers, to submit to your web site to be listed, just visit the above url and enter your domain name.

Also on this page is information about AdWords. With credit card payment, you can see your ad on Google today, reads the plug.

AOL - To advertise on AOL, go to http://mediaspace.aol.com and complete a survey to get in touch with an AOL ad salesperson.

claims to reach 81% of all online users with AOL brands.

InfoSeek- Purchase through www.overture.com

Like the other search engines, InfoSeek uses an automated process that takes up to six weeks for your site to be listed. It is also possible to have your site listed in the Go Directory. Information for the Go directory is available on the URL submission page. If you are submitting your own site to Go.com, you can improve the site's relevancy, if it becomes part of the Go.com index. This means your Web site is more likely to be displayed on a Search Results page when viewers submit searches on topics related to your site.

InfoSeek provides helpful information about how to achieve the best rankings on their site (all the search engines use slightly different methods for their rankings). InfoSeek first suggests web sites have a descriptive page title. A page's TITLE tag should be highly descriptive. Avoid generic titles such as "Home Page." Be creative and let viewers really know what the page is about.Use a META description tag. The META description tag lets you specify the exact description you want Go.com todisplay in a summary description on a Search Results page. If you do not use this tag, Go.com creates a summary description based on text on the page. An auto-generated description may or may not tell viewers what you want them to know about your site. A META description tag can contain up to 1024 characters. It must be placed in the <HEAD> element (along with any other tags already there). Do not format any of the text in the <META> tag with other HTML tags. Here is an example:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Landing Venture Capital</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="This
site offers valuable tips on obtaining
venture capital for your hi-tech
start-up.">
</HEAD>

This would appear in a Go.com Search Results
page as:

Landing Venture Capital
This site offers valuable tips on obtaining venture capital for your hi-tech startup

Use a META keywords tag. The META keywords tag lets you enter keywords that help Go.com properly index your site. The careful use of appropriate keywords can increase the chances that your site will show up on a Search Results page when viewers search for a topic related to your site. The META keywords tag can contain up to 1024 characters of text. Separate keywords or keyword phrases with commas. Here's an example of the use of this tag in the <HEAD> section of a page:

<HEAD> <TITLE>Landing Venture
Capital</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Tips on
obtaining venture capital for your hi-tech
startup">
<META name="keywords" contents="asset
based lending, capital enterprise funding,
equity funding, expansion capital, funds
for growth, growth financing,
underwriting, venture investment">
</HEAD>

Note: Don't try to increase your site's relevancy by repeating the same keyword over and over again. Go.com severely penalizes Web sites that attempt to subvert the index in this way. This abuse may lower the ranking of your site in Search Results pages or cause it to be removed from the Go.com index altogether.

Important: If the site you submit uses frames, be sure to include a <NOFRAMES> element on the <FRAMESET> page. This element should fully describe the entire Web site. Go.com will index this text in the <NOFRAMES> element, if the site is accepted. Also make sure to include <META> description and keyword tags on the <FRAMESET> page as well.

Excite- http://www.excite.com/info/add_url/
Excite does not guarantee that your site will be listed or provide a time frame for it being reviewed but they do allow you to submit your site as well as choose a category for it. Excite offers the following material on improving your site's ranking on their engine: Suppose you want users searching for "Hawaiian bed and breakfasts" to find your site among the first 20 sites retrieved. Simply adding, removing, or changing a few sentences on your homepage can alter the way our spider indexes you.

The higher the listing appears on our result pages, the more confident we are that the site listed matches the search query that was entered. The rating is generated by an algorithmic equation that measures the site against the concept described in the query.

Our design tip is simple: relegate unrelated topics to subsidiary pages. If you're advertising your Hawaiian bed and breakfast, don't use the homepage to emphasize price, the way the ocean looks from a bedroom window, or your famous pineapple rum concoction. Instead, emphasize bed, breakfast, Hawaii, and vacation.

Understand Meta Tags

How to Improve the Summary of Your Site: Excite Search generates site summaries automatically based on the content of the pages it indexes, using heuristics designed to extract important portions of each page to help identify what
the page is about. While the summaries built this way generally do represent the page contents in a meaningful way, they do not always do so in a manner consistent with the site builder's intentions.

To give Web publishers more control over how Excite Search represents their pages in search result listings, our indexing process first looks for the presence of a META-DESCRIPTION tag before trying to generate a summary automatically based on the content of each page. If a document has a META-DESCRIPTION tag, Excite Search will use its contents as the summary of that document when the page shows up in search results.

If you'd like to write your own summary instead of having Excite generate one for you, you can specify your summary in the header of your page as follows:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Center for Kumquat Research</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Information from around the world on
kumquat farming techniques and current kumquat production and consumption
data">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

This way, when your page shows up in Excite Search results, a kumquat researcher will see the
summary for it just as you specified it.

Lycos- http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html

After submitting your site, Lyco's will have its automated system spider crawl your site within two or three weeks. They provide interesting tips to get your site listed on their site. They take a different approach then Yahoo! and AltaVista.

You may submit more than one URL from your site to Lycos as long as the URLs represent distinct webpages. Multiple pages that contain the same content will not be added.

The Lycos spider will try to travel through links contained in the webpage you submit. A good rule of thumb is to count on the spider traveling down one level from the page you submit. To submit your web site, you'll just have to enter it at the above url along with your e-mail address. If you don't want to be on Lycos' e-mail list, uncheck the check box below the area where you entered your data.

Direct Hit- Submit through http://ask.ineedhits.com/
By submitting your URL to Direct Hit, they will also supply your information to 36 other directories. Unlike the other sites, Direct Hit allows you to provide Keywords. Depending on the timing of the submission and our crawl, it can take anywhere from one to four weeks to get listed in the World Wide Web index.

The Direct Hit rankings are based on actual search activity of millions of Internet users. New sites submitted or found during a crawl are listed in the search engine and given an opportunity to be found by searchers. Sites that users visit and spend time at for particular search topics are then ranked higher than sites that are consistently ignored

Northern Light- http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Some say that if you can't find the information you seek elsewhere, try Northern Light. Simple procedure to list your site as with just about all other search engines, they use an automated process to find and categorize your site. The Northern Light search engine functions as a natural language search utility. Their search engine reads and index all of the text on the page of your site. When a user runs a search, the engine will return all pages in the database that contain those search terms. Sites are classified and ranked automatically by the search engine, based on the text on the page.

My favorite search engine is not listed here!
There are numerous other search engines; some specializing in particular geographic regions, others focused on an industry. One directory that breaks search engines down by country is http://www.searchenginecolossus.com. Be forewarned that the site requires patience to sort through all the listings but it is a great reference for information on different types of engines.

Want more information?

For more information on techniques is using search engines to your advantage check out http://www.searchengines.com or http://www.searchenginewatch.com.

A good source of information on search engines, as well as additional information on strategies, try the Spider's Apprentice at http://www.monash.com/spidap.html.