Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines
Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:
A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the
search engine's index.
Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search
for a particular keyword or phrase.
To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting
your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.
Unless you have money to burn, I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay
for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves
or by third parties.
If you have inbound links links to your sitesfrom other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your
siteeventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?
It's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given
time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given
search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are
included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited
resultsbut at least the price is right!

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and
always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process
up by manually submitting your site to search engines.


Submission Tools

>You may also want to use an automated site submission tool that submits your site to multiple search engines in one fell swoop.
It's quite likely that your web host provides a utility with this functionality that you can use to submit the URLs for your hosted domains to a
group of search engines.



If you search Google with a phrase like "Search Engine Submit," you'll find many free services that submit to a group of search sites for
you. Typically, these free submission sites try to up-sell or cross-sell you on a product or service, but since you don't have to buy anything,
why not take advantage of the free service? The two best-known examples of this kind of site are Submit Express ,
http://www.submitexpress.com, which will submit your URL to 40 sites for free (just be sure you pass on the various offers you'll find on the
site) and NetMechanic , http://www.netmechanic.com, another search engine submission site along the same lines.