Search Engines - Submission

To submit a Site properly to some of the top listings/search engines, we use a piece of software called TopDog to help us. You will find that the set of submission criteria is different for each search engine, and, what's more, the engines change their criteria on a regular basis.

With other top Search Engines and Listings, a manual submission approach is best. You will be required to select your category (like a classification in Yellow Pages) in each listing, which means drilling down through the multiple, and sometimes very similar, headings. It also means looking up your competitors to see where they are listed. You can expect to spend as much as a day if you want to perform this task correctly. Also, the situation needs to monitored at intervals to ensure correct classification and positioning in the same way that you would monitor the rest of your advertising campaign.

For a guaranteed listing, Paid Inclusion is becoming the order of the day with major search engines. Different search engines charge different rates. The service provided, the coverage of the search engine, its partners and its data sources are important considerations.

Don't be fooled by the offers of the automatic, press one button and it's done submissions. Yes, you may get listed, but you won't be in the right category, and you won't have descriptive text about your business. We've tried this method in the past, and what you end up with is little better than not being listed at all.

Some Search Engines will index your Site automatically, by periodically crawling through the Internet, picking up Site names. However, it can take some considerable time for your Site to be indexed in this manner, it does not guarantee that it will appear in the correct classification, and only some Search Engines work like this anyway. Your site must be designed and coded correctly to enable these crawler programs to access all the pages. Sites using frames need particular attention.