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Submitting Your Website to Search Engines- Part2
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In part 1 we covered the basics of search engine submission now we move on to the actual submission process and on checking your submissions, and then on to better ways of getting indexed.
Always start by submitting your home page, do this by submitting your Website- i.e. If your home page is http://www.build-your-website.co.uk/index.htm then you would submit:
http://www.build-your-Website.co.uk
and not
http://www.build-your-website.co.uk/index.htm
Always include the www unless it can't be reached that way, If you are not sure check it by trying it in a browser. Most search engines will spider your entire Website without you needing to submit other pages manually. You can also submit other pages you think are important like the sitemap, articles pages etc.
Please do not over submit! In general you wont be punished (not guaranteed) but it certainly wont improve the time taken to get indexed. A general guideline is 1 page per day and not more than 5 pages in total.
I only ever submit the home page and I let the search engine find the others.
Here is the Google submit form. Just type in your URL and the submission code ( to prevent auto submission software) and click the Addurl button (nice to see they have a sense of humour) :
There is nothing really wrong with submitting using software programs. However some Websites like Google and MSN have taken measures to stop auto submissions by asking you to enter a code each time you submit (see above). What they are generally trying to avoid is mass submitting by scripts (spamming).
If your website package offers auto submission then great, if not, I would not go out an buy auto submission software. After all we are only looking at submitting your home page to three engines and you normally only need to do it once.
You've submitted ! so how do you check if the search engine has listed your Website. You could try searching on one of your keywords .e.g.. making your own Website. If you don't find a listing it may not mean that you're not in the database but just that you haven't scored very well for those keywords.
If I wanted to check if my Website was listed in the search engine like Google. I would go the search engine search page and enter:
Website site:www.build-your-Website.co.uk
The general syntax is keyword + site: + Website name
The use of the keyword is optional
site: + Website name
will list all indexed pages
If that doesn't work (Alta vista has different syntax) then go to the advanced search page and you can do the same there. What you are essentially doing is searching for a word you know exists and on your Website only.
If you get a result you are listed if you don't you're not listed yet. The screenshot below show the process:
Here I'm asking Google to list all pages from my site with the keyword Website on them. You can see that Google puts the keyword is bold.
If you have waited 8 weeks and you are still not listed or have changed the web page significantly then re-submit the web page. Avoid over submitting by not submitting more than 1 page per day to any search engine. You will usually find that once you are listed in a search engine then new pages that you submit are picked up within 1-2 weeks without the need to submit them manually.
Search engines like to find sites themselves. So in order for them to find your site then you need to get your site listed on another website. The easiest way to do this is to submit your website to directories. Again like search engines there are 1000s of directories and again you don't need to submit your site to all of them.
Initially I would only list with websites that don't require a back link and once I'd run out of those I would then target the others. However that's getting ahead a bit. All you are looking for at this moment is a link from a directory so that the search engines will find you.
Using this technique you can get indexed usually within a week and if the directory is very popular in a day. Getting your site listed in directories is just like adding your site to search engines except that most directories will review your site.
Because your website will be reviewed make sure it is ready. This doesn't mean finished! just that it is tidy with no broken links and under construction pages and that the pages you have, are themselves complete pages, not just the opening paragraph of a page that you will finish later.
Even though I have manually submitted most of my existing websites the technique I use on new sites is to add them to directories and to list them on my existing sites (link exchange). I no longer use the Addurl form.
I would recommend that you do the same. Managing Directory Submissions will take you through the process and has a list of some of the directories I use.
Other related articles and resources:
