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Search engine submission

Many website owners mistakenly believe that submission frequency (how often you submit your web pages to search engines) will actually increase rankings. Some people just want a simple answer to the following reader question(s):

How often should I submit my site to the search engines? Every 3 months? Monthly? Annually?

Site submission to search engines, web directories and other industry-related sites is often done incorrectly. I cover this topic, in detail, in Part 5 of Search Engine Visibility (2nd edition). Below are some general guidelines to follow regarding search engine submission:

Spider-based vs. human-based search engine submission
Crawler-based search engine submission
Web directory submission
Monitor results on web analytics software
Submit and resubmit web pages only when necessary

Spider-based vs. human-based search engine submission

Treat spider-based search engine submissions and human-based search engine submissions differently.

Most people incorrectly believe that crawler-based search engines and human-based search engines are the same. A crawler-based search engine uses a program that searches documents (i.e. web pages, which are mostly XHTML documents) for specified keywords and returns the list of documents. You do not have to submit your site to the spider-based search engines. They will generally find your site on their own.

A human-based search engine (such as the Yahoo directory, Best of the Web, Business.com )depends on people for listings. A directory will not list your web page if you do not register it with them. Directories are usually divided into categories and you must submit your URL under the most appropriate categories.

Because search engines and directories are so different, it is best to have different submission strategies.

Crawler-based search engine submission

To get optimal listings in the crawler-based search engines, keywords and key concepts must be placed strategically throughout your web pages. To summarize, you need these words in phrases in:

Titles
Meta-tags
Alt-attribute
Headings
Main, visible body text
Anchor text
Other factors that affect search engine rankings are (X)HTML layout, keyword density, keyword prominence, and keyword placement.

Details about keyword placement are available in Parts 2 and 3 of Search Engine Visibility (2nd edition).

Coming soon: The Truth about Sitemap Submission

Web directory submission

I recommend that you first submit your home page/main URL (yourcompanyname.com) accepted into the major human-based search engines before submitting to the crawler-based search engines. It's one of the quickest ways to get web site popularity.

Before you try to get more targeted pages listed in the human-based search engines, make sure your home page is accepted first. You will stand a better chance of getting multiple pages listed in a directory if your overall site has been accepted first.

The time between site submission and addition to the search engine or directory database is called the lead time. You will not see results in your traffic logs until the lead time has passed.

Monitor results on web analytics software

We are firm believers in using quality web analytics software. In fact, we do not believe that anyone can have a successful online business without it. Omniture, ClickTracks, WebTrends, and Google Analytics are good analytics packages.

You will be able to see the results of your search engine optimization and link development strategies in your site statistics software. You can measure the keywords used, the URLs giving you the most referrals, the type of browsers used to view your site, the time of day your site is accessed, and so forth. All of this data will give you a clearer profile of your site's visitors.

Then, based on this data, you can tweak the XHTML, graphics, and content to best suit your customers.

Both Google and Bing have tools to help you see which pages are crawled as well

Submit and resubmit web pages only when necessary.

An online business that uses search engine optimization as a marketing strategy will use this submission, monitoring, and tweaking practice. Site submission is an ongoing process because search engines constantly change their relevancy algorithms.

We recommend that you resubmit a web page to a search engine only when there is a significant change to web page or if a page has dropped from the index. (Changing a meta-tag description does not constitute a significant change.)

Sitemaps (which are not a real site map but rather a URL list) can also be helpful.

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