Add New Engines

Order!

1. Your submission strategy
2. Why am I not positioned in the top 30?
3. How the search engines work ?
4. Submitting is not enough
5. How to prepare your pages for submission
6. Your Web Page Style:
7. Selecting the BEST keywords/phrases
8. How to submit your pages ?
9. How to follow up on your work ?
10. Other ways to promote your Web site

1. Your submission strategy
If you're serious about improving your Web site's visibility and thereby increasing your site traffic, you must have a plan of action. Improving your Search Engine positioning is not an instantaneous thing, but instead, it's a PROCESS. WebRanking together with Submission 2000 makes this process much easier and therefore becomes invaluable in improving your site's positions and ultimately increasing your traffic. There's no way to make every page rank well with every search engine for every keyword or phrase someone might use. However, you can work to make at least one page in your Web site rank near the top for each engine. Ideally, you'll want one of your pages to be positioned well for each of your primary keywords. This may take some thought on how to setup your pages to achieve the desired results. Study the section on "Tips to Improve your Search Rankings" for ways to do this.

Here's an outline of the general strategy we recommend:

1. Check your site's visibility as it stands today. If your Web site has already been submitted to one or more of the search engines, you'll want to find out how well you rank right now for keywords and phrases people might use to find you.
   
2. Is your page listed in the top 30 to 50 positions for your primary keywords? If not then please visit and study your competitor's Web site. Use this competitive intelligence as a tool to improve your own rankings, redesigning some of your pages (or creating new ones) and then resubmitting.
   
3. If you're not in the top 50 now, you'll probably want to change the pages or links of WebRanking's default Matches to Search. If you scan a couple hundred matches and find your listing, you'll be able to track your progress better, and see whether your changes and re- submissions are moving you up or down the list. Beware that your searches will take longer the more records you search.
   
4. If at least one of your pages is already in a top 30 position with some engines but not others, study and understand why your pages are not ranking as well as they could. Even minor changes in page design combined with re-submission can have significant effects on your traffic. There's also no other more cost-effective way to increase traffic to your site.
   
5. Re-submit your pages again on a regular basis. Make sure your page design has been optimized for keyword searches, then resubmit. If you just submitted recently, make sure you've allowed enough time for the engine to add your page to their database. You can find out their current lag time for indexing new sites by going to the engine's submit area.
   
6. Study the section on 'Tips to Improve your Search Rankings' as well as other tips and resources found on the Web.
   
7. Your rankings may move up or down dramatically from day to day. When this happens, you'll need to understand WHY. Each search engine is different and continually changes and adds new pages to its index every day. These things will effect your positions over time and sometimes very quickly. We recommend you keep careful notes on when you submitted or resubmitted to each engine and what pages you submitted. You may even wish to create sub- directories with different copies of your Web site at various stages.

2. Why am I not positioned in the top 30?
You may be using those keywords in your meta tags or on your page, but you may still not show up on the reports. If your site doesn't show up on the reports the first time, don't assume Web Ranking is broken! Discovering the "bad news" and how to overcome it is the first step to achieving your goal !

3. How the search engines work ?
If you have used the Internet at all, you should be very familiar with what Internet Search Engines do. You will also notice that it is sometimes difficult to find what you are looking for, even with a fairly specific search. Your potential visitors will have the same trouble, unless you do a little leg work to make sure you are listed well for the keywords that are important to your Web site.

Just in case you're unfamiliar with how the engines work, here's a brief explanation: Most engines "spider" the Web looking for new pages to add to their database or index. You need to wait for one of these spiders to locate your site, Once your pages are added to the index, people can do a search on the Internet for various keywords to find pages that "best" match their search criteria. Appearing within the first few pages of the search is critical to people finding you. These matches will be ranked or positioned in order of importance. The exact rules they use to rank pages for relevance are generally kept a secret and changed often. However, many of these rules can be determined through simple observation.

4. Submitting is not enough
Unfortunately, simply submitting your pages is only part of the job. With millions of pages in dozens of search indexes, the odds of many people finding you are still not very good without careful planning. Even after you submit, the page can often be dropped later for no apparent reason or never be accepted at all. Search engines are not yet 100% accurate. But considering the sheer volume they deal with everyday, its understandable, but unfortunate that there will be random errors.

The main reason submitting is not enough are your positions. It takes some follow up, revision, and resubmitting of your pages to improve your positions on the search engines. If people search for a keyword or phrase and can't find you, then you might as well not be in the search engine index at all!

5. How to prepare your pages for submission ?
BE PRODUCT/SERVICE CENTERED: Make sure you optimize at least one or more of your pages for EVERY product or service you offer. This is one of the biggest mistakes most site managers make when designing and indexing their Web sites.

DON'T SPAM: Don't blatantly "spam" search engines. Specifically, you should not put in keywords that don't pertain to your site just so you might attract more visitors. You could put in words such as "sex" or "stock market" or whatever. However:

1. You'll not be attracting the visitors you want anyway.
2. You'll only serve to annoy people and label yourself as a "spammer".
3. Many search engines are looking for various kinds of index spamming and are banning sites entirely that they catch! If your site or pages disappear, consider this as a possible reason why. Sometimes "innocent" pages can be dropped as well. However, that's why you need Web Ranking to keep track of everything for you.

WATCH KEYWORD REPETITION: Be careful not to repeat a single keyword more than 10 times, since some engines are now penalizing for "excessive" use of keywords. However, don't take this warning to the extreme since you DO want to repeat your primary keywords as many times as feasible since this effects relevancy rankings greatly.

The BEST tips to improve your rankings:
TITLE: Include and repeat keywords that people might search for to find you in the TITLE of all your pages. This is very important. Keep common word groups or phrases that people might search on together if you can. The TITLE is EXTREMELY important to achieving good rankings.

PROMINENCY: Keywords that are more prominent will be weighted much higher with the search engines. Most engines rank you higher if the keyword or phrase is near the beginning of the title and as close to the beginning of the page as possible.

LENGTH OF PAGE: Keep your pages short while including and repeating keywords frequently, particularly in the first 3-5 lines of the pages. Some engines ignore or largely ignore wording beyond the first paragraph or two. Having a short page goes much farther to improve your rankings with many engines than you might think, even if the keywords are not repeated very many times.

"DOORWAY" PAGES: Unfortunately, what is appealing to the search engines is not always the best way to display the content for you Web site. Therefore, strongly consider creating a secondary page for each product or service you offer designed for the search engines. Describe the product/service clearly but make sure you make generous use of keywords in your sentences. At the bottom of this short paragraph, put a link to your primary page such as "Please click here for more information on ABC ".

The reason this works, and generally works better than most methods, is that engines often take the keywords being searched and divide it by the total number of words in the page or in the first portion of the page. Therefore, you may only have the keyword on the page a couple of times, but if there's not a lot of other words, those keywords appear to be much more "significant" to the page's overall content.

You don't have to have links to these secondary pages from your home page. They simply act as a "doorway" to the appropriate page on your Web site so are not seen by other visitors. If you don't link them through to your home page or a close secondary page, you'll need to submit each of these pages manually for the search engines to find and index them. Be sure to review the warnings in Submitting Your Pages before doing this.

REPEATING KEYWORDS: Experiment with repeating keywords up to 10 times and more on some engines. If this makes your page look bad, consider putting the keywords at the top of the page preferably in the same color as the background. That way nobody can see them but they should still get indexed. Warning: Some engines are now detecting wording in the same color as the background and either ignoring such text or leaving the page out of the index altogether!

META TAGS: You should fill out META tags for keywords, author's name, and page classification. You can find the syntax for this in most good HTML editors.

META tags tell search engines what keywords or categories you would like to be listed under. A couple of engines factor this in to their indexing algorithm. However, generally it will not make a significant difference in how you are positioned. It doesn't hurt to try though especially since any of the engines can change the rules tomorrow and it could catapult you to the top of the list (assuming you took the time to add the META tags).

OBSERVE: Use the Web Ranking Report to see which pages appear above yours in a search. Establish an Internet connection and then jump to those sites. Use your browser to view the HTML source code for the page. Try to determine why that page ranked better than yours for that particular engine and keyword search. Most likely it emphasizes one or more of the techniques described here. Once you recognize the technique, try to duplicate and improve upon that concept to achieve a better ranking, or at least a roughly equivalent ranking.

EXPERIMENT: Try different page designs and re-submit them. Use Web Ranking to quickly check your rankings. What works for one engine may not work so well with another. However, you can use Web Ranking Report archives to see if changes helped or hurt your rankings for each engine. Consider making different secondary pages tailored for each engine when necessary. Avoid submitting too many similar pages to the same engine (particularly on the same day) or you risk your site being banned or the submission rejected.

6. Your Web Page Style :
FRAMES: You may be interested to know that the AltaVista spider (at least as of this writing) will not follow links that are in frames. This means that if your opening page is created with frames, then the spider will find absolutely nothing else on your site and you will seriously limit your exposure to people doing searches for you unless you submit each secondary page manually.

If you wish to use frames, a good idea is to put in fake links in the section.

Insert a link such as Click here should work. Since it won't appear on your page, no one can accidentally click on it. However, the spider will be able to follow it. Support for frames may have been added by now, but it may still pose a problem with other engines. Therefore, better safe than sorry.

LINK TO HOME PAGE: Since many visitors will find pages that branch off from your home page, ALWAYS, on every single page, include a link back to your home page and/or your previous page. If you don't, people from the search engines will often jump a secondary page in your site but will not be able to easily find your home page and will then go on to someone else's Web site! You'd be surprised how many big companies make this simple design error.

FIRST FEW LINES: Most search engines will display the first few lines of text from the page it finds to the user. The user will then scan these lines to determine if its what they're looking for. Even if you have the keywords in there, you also need to say something to encourage the user to click on your site over the others listed. Try to as clearly as possible describe the contents of that page or your site in those first few lines! If not, you may rank well, but no one will click on you anyway.

7. Selecting the BEST keywords/phrases
There are several things to consider when choosing keywords and phrases. The most important is to put yourself in the shoes of the type of visitor you want to attract. Make a list of what kind of keywords or phrases they are likely to search on. This requires you to separate yourself from your product, service or web site and think like the average Joe who might want to find you, but knows nothing about your site.

It's a good idea to ask friends or co-workers what they might type in to find your site, or even have them go to a search engine and tell them to try and find information on the topic your site happens to cover. Watch what words and phrases they use.

CONCEPTS: Include concept keywords such as "web promotion software" if that's what you sell, but also try and be specific enough so that its not too broad. BRANDS: Include more specific brand names such as Microsoft. If you offer services, then try to use service brand names when possible. Legally, you should put the ® reserved symbol or ™ trademark symbol after the names when mentioning them on the page.

COMPANY NAMES: If you offer products from a well known company, include that company's name in your keywords. Unless you are a well known company/organization such as Microsoft or Apple, its generally less important to emphasize your name as a keyword.

COMMON WORDS: There are now so many pages and words indexed on the Web, that a search on many common words such as "software" or "Internet" are going to be completely ignored for that search by the engine! Therefore, most people have to search on two or three word phrases to find what they're looking for. Trying to be listed well on every phrase/keyword combination they might search for next to impossible.

TEST KEYWORDS: Ideally, before you even start a new Internet Web site (or even after), you should see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find you. The fewer matches found for your search, the easier it will be to get your name up near the top. Also of  importance are the quality of the matches that appear. Your keywords may only bring up a lot of garbage that your potential audience would have no interest in anyway. Therefore, with the proper strategy, you could be the only site of your type that appears near the top of that search. WebRanking's Ranking report will let you see what competing pages/sites you are up against. There may be phrases that people are likely to search for which are much easier to achieve good rankings on than more common words and phrases. This strategy can gain you unexpected new traffic.

PHRASES: As mentioned, many people are likely use multiple word phrases to find you, particularly when single words do not provide adequate scope for the search. The syntax for this varies by engine but generally phrases are searched for by surrounding them with quotes. Therefore, make a list of 2-3 word phrases people are likely to search for. When placing keywords on your page, make sure you always include them in a phrase that the visitor might use.

Keep the important words chained together in sentences on the page. If the user searches on "KEYWORD1" AND "KEYWORD2" then you only have to have the words in the same proximity on the page. If, however, they search on "KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2" along with the surrounding quotes, then the words MUST be together on your page, preferably multiple times to find a match. Therefore, its a good idea to monitor your position for both "web site promotion" and just web site promotion as an example.

Optimizing your page for phrase searches can do wonders in helping people find you. However, because of the many combinations its traditionally been an impossible task without a tool like WebRanking to help you monitor your results. Its often difficult to rank well for popular keywords. However, few sites make serious efforts to optimize for common phrases leaving you with great opportunities to increase your traffic!

CASE-SENSITIVITY: If the user types the word Books then most engines will search for "Books" with an uppercase "B" ONLY. If your page has only "books" in it, you will not be found! On the other hand, if they search for "books" and your page has "Books" on it, most engines default to finding words of any case when the keyword used was in all lower case. Therefore, it pays to make sure you have at least some of the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user might search that way. The easiest place to do this is in the title of the page, in meta tags, and at the beginning of sentences.

8. How to submit your pages ?
There are basically three ways to get your Web site indexed:

1. Wait for the search engine to find you by following a link from another site. (May take a very long time or never indexed).
2. Go to each search engine and select their submit URL option.
3. Use one of the various page submission software or services such as Dynamic Submission 2000. This can save you time when you need to do multiple engines.

Once you've submitted to the engine, expect to be indexed anywhere from minutes with InfoSeek to 6-8 weeks such as with Yahoo generally. It varies by search engine and how many "growing pains" they're experiencing at that particular time. It's also all to common not to be listed at all for no apparent reason which is why follow up and re-submission is crucial! Generally the page where you submit your URL will have the current waiting period to be indexed. Note this number for each engine so you know when there's a potential problem if Web Ranking continues to show you're not listed.

Most engines let you submit as often as you like, although some do not allow you to submit the same page more than once per day. However, most let you submit as many as 50 pages or more per day if you like.

Several things you should keep in mind in submitting pages:
SUBMIT EACH PAGE? Most engines will not only index your main page but will also seek out links to your other pages to index. They'll move down two or more levels down the site tree. Therefore, its not always necessary to submit each page individually to those engines. However, if you create secondary pages that link to your home page but not the other way, you'll need to submit those pages seperately.

Our personal experience has shown that close monitoring of these claims is necessary since either the engines don't always do what they say or they sometimes are inconsistent about indexing those other pages in our experience. When in doubt, submit the important ones individually by specifying the page name in the URL. Example: http://www.mysite.com/mypage1.htm.

MAKE SURE EVERYTHING'S READY FIRST : Since many engines take weeks to index a page, you might want to jump the gun on a new site and submit it before you've got all the pages done. Be careful about this, since if an engine spiders your site and doesn't find your home page or the page you specify, most will not try again later. In addition, many engines will immediately verify whether your page exists and reject your submission that same day. Of course, they are rarely nice enough to warn you of the problem.

SPAMMING: Some engines are reported to have started watching for people submitting too many pages at once. They sometimes limit you on how many you can submit per day or week. They may also start looking for people submitting too many similar pages and will ban sites that they feel are abusing the system. Therefore, its always best to proceed with caution and submit only as many variations of a page as absolutely necessary to achieve your goal. If you keep it to one regular page and one optimized summary page for each product/service then you should not have any problems. Also, you should space out submissions when possible (perhaps once a week).

YAHOO: Yahoo, unlike many other engines, only adds your site after a human being has reviewed it and decided it was good enough to be in their index. Make sure you've done a bang up job in providing good content for your site before submitting to Yahoo and other review oriented services. These engines also take more follow up to get listed since indexing is done by human beings who can make mistakes or can overlook sites the first time. Some engines ask you send them an e-mail if you didn't get listed instead of just submitting the page again. You should also beware that LinkStar and YellowPages only accept one page submission per web site. Therefore the "Doorway" page strategy will not work with these directory oriented engines.

9. How to follow up on your work ?
This was once next to impossible to do consistently for very many pages. However, Web Ranking makes this easy. Follow up is extremely important. We can't stress this enough. If the indexes on the search engines along with your pages were all static, then follow up would not be necessary. However, since they are both very dynamic, it definitely pays to monitor your pages at least weekly or monthly.

Tips on following up:
Keep detailed notes on when you submit each page and to what engine you submitted. Also note when you're at the engine how long their current wait time is to index a site. That way, if AltaVista is supposed to index in 2-4 days and doesn't, you can resubmit on the 5th or 6th day if you don't show. Unless you're in a huge hurry, you'll probably want to give them a little leeway just in case they're running a bit behind.

However, staying on top of situations can reduce the time to get listed on problematic engines from months to weeks sometimes. We've heard of many people who went months without ever getting listed on certain engines. Follow up is crucial.

If you don't get listed in the normal length of time, resubmit and/or send them an e-mail. Some sites require that you send them an e-mail to resubmit a page. Other sites get so many e-mails and complaints you'll be lucky to ever receive a response. The best thing you can do is minimize the work it takes to monitor these problems by using a tool such as Web Ranking.

Try InfoSeek First! InfoSeek now indexes pages within minutes This is invaluable for trying out new page designs and then running Web Ranking to follow up. However, you must submit each page one at a time and you can submit the same page only once per day. Still, it beats waiting weeks as with other engines. AltaVista generally indexes within days, so its another good one to work with. Hotbot now indexes within 48 hours! If you have trouble getting good positions on InfoSeek, don't assume you won't have better luck with Hotbot!

10. Other ways to promote your Web site
Although being indexed well on the major search engines is the number one thing you can do to promote your site inexpensively, there are other effective ways.

Banner ads: You see them all over the Net. Average response rate is reported to be about 2-4% click through for each banner displayed. Rates can vary though from zero to 17% or higher. They can be cost effective if you use an eye catching design and slogan and you TARGET your message. Try to advertise on sites that are related to your target audience. Or, most of the search engines now let you display banners based on the keyword the user is searching on!

If your budget is tight, however, consider a free banner exchange service such as www.linkexchange.com. For every two banner impressions you allow to be displayed on your site, they will display your banner on another site for free. Its all automatic and can increase your traffic at zero cost. However, there are drawbacks such as the risk of losing your own customers prematurely who chase after someone else's advertisement. Also, banners can increase the load time of your page somewhat. Still, its an effective way to help increase your traffic if you're on a low budget.

Offer something for free: This one is used all over the Net and can work well if you have a related product to the product/service you offer for free. However, it doesn't matter what you have for free, if people still don't know about it, you'll have a hard time increasing traffic based solely on this strategy. (Unless you're giving away free TV sets or something). Combine this technique with another to be effective. Also, don't give away too much so that you fail to convert many to sales. Many make this mistake and are never able to turn a profit.

Because so many things are "FREE" on the Internet, you must work harder on your Web page's content and design to add a perceived value to your product/service. Otherwise, you'll have people leaving thinking they might be able to find the same thing for free somewhere else.

Newsgroups Posting: Frequent newsgroups that your target audience would participate in. Leave helpful messages and sign your message with a tag line describing your Web site, product or services. Be careful not to sound like a blatant sales pitch or you'll violate the rules of many newsgroups.

Direct E-mail: E-mail is a powerful sales tool but you should avoid sending unsolicited and untargetted e-mails. You'll get far more hostile and negative responses than positive responses. Use e-mail for follow up and where they've asked to be on a list or to receive certain types of information. You should not share the names on your mailing list without first informing your list participants of this possibility or getting their permission.

Newsletters: If you have good writing skills, write a free newsletter about the subject area you are targeting and send it by e-mail to subscribers. These newsletters are popularly called e-zines. Make the content fresh and interesting and you can build a large following in no time.

Link Exchange: Find sites which will attract the type of visitors you're looking for on your own site. If you're not a direct competitor, you could e-mail the Webmaster of those related sites and ask them if they'll add a link to your site if you add a link to theirs. Larger sites may want a fee for doing this. However, successfully negotiating a link from another site can do wonders for improving quality traffic to your own site.

Content: Don't forget to put in at least as much effort into the actual content and design of your site as you do in the promotion. Otherwise, you may get people to your site but few will take advantage of your product or service. If your content is dynamic or is re-usable in some way, it can work to draw visitors back to the site later. However, this doesn't happen as often as you'd think so always try and capture the user's name in order to follow up with a friendly e-mail or special offer later if possible.

If you're selling something, most of the elements of a good direct mail piece will also apply to the text of a Web site such as:

1. Make it easy to contact you in whatever way they choose.
2. Revise and proof read your text many times to make it easy to read, persuasive, and free from typos.
3. Avoid too much "hype" since most on the Internet (and elsewhere) will see it for what it is. However, never make your copy too dry and boring either!
4. Don't forget to ask for the sale or to encourage them to click on the order form.