You've probably heard about submitting your website to the search engines. There is an entire industry set up to automatically submit your URLS to hundreds, even thousands, of search engines every month. Some even tout hand submission of your websites to each search engine. My advice is don't fall for it. It's a waste of money. To understand why you have to know a little bit about how search engines work.
First of all, let's introduce the top search engines as of Thu, Feb 09, 2012. The top search engines are determined by the amount of potential TRAFFIC each search engine has to give to your website. Spend 100% of your efforts boosting your rankings on the search engines below:
Pretty obvious so far. Now, how do you get into the "Search Engine Ranking Pages", aka the "SERPS"?
First things first, you need to develop a website that will do well in the
search engines. If your new to this make sure you contact a professional
SEO (
Search Engine Optimizer) to steer you in the right direction. There's a lot to learn about search and it's best to spend your time focusing on your strengths. You may
contact us or consult our
Search Engine Optimization (
SEO) Directory to find an expert.
Assuming you have a great website that is optimized on the proper search keywords, how do you get your website crawled by the best search engines? The answer is by placing your links on sites that are currently indexed by the search engines. Not by manually submitting your site to the individual search engines. Some say that search engines will penalize your website for manually submitting your site. Probably not, but if you want to be indexed as quickly as possible you'll need to place links to your website on POPULAR websites.
The best type of site to have your link on, in my opinion, is a site that is in constant flux, like a classified ads site, a press release site, or a current news site. Why? Because search engines need to remain current to be of value to the user. Search engines crawl web pages more frequently if the content on the web page constantly changes. This ensures that the search engines have an accurate snapshot of the entire web at any point in time.
One of my favorite sites you can use to get crawled quickly is
Craigslist. Craigslist is a free classified ads site. Pretty much every major metropolitan area has it's own Craigslist classified portal. For instance, if you're a Real Estate Agent in San Diego, place your ad for free under
San Diego Real Estate Services and you'll get your site crawled fairly quickly.
Of course, you can manually submit your URLS to the search engines. In fact, links are provided below for each Search Engine's URL Submission Page for your reference.
Now that you've placed your links ("spider bait") on a popular website, you'll need to determine if your site has been crawled by the search engine bots. You'll need your web server log files handy for this.
To determine if you've been crawled by a search engine, view your log files for the website in question and search for the User Agents listed in the table below. If you have web tracking software, such as Urchin or WebTrends, search for the following User Agents.
SEARCH ENGINE BOTS INFORMATION:
| SEARCH ENGINE |
USER AGENTS - Look for these hits on your web server log files |
SEARCH ENGINE
BOTS INFO |
| Google |
Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html) |
GoogleBot |
| Yahoo! Search |
Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Yahoo!+Slurp;+http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp) |
Yahoo Bot |
| MSN Search |
msnbot/1.0+(+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) |
MSN Bot |
| Ask Jeeves / Teoma |
Mozilla/2.0+(compatible;+Ask+Jeeves/Teoma;++http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/tech_crawling.html) |
Ask Jeeves / Teoma Bot |
Finally, here are some guidelines for improving your search engine rankings on the best search engines.
I hope this basic Search Engine Optimization information helps.
Contact us today for more information.