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Yahoo – Yahoo is organized by categories. Before
you submit your site, you have to navigate through Yahoo and decide which category
fits your site best. Once you’ve found the appropriate category (and you can ask
Yahoo to make one if none available fit you), you must ‘Suggest your site’ to
the staff at Yahoo. This is done by clicking the ‘Suggest a site’ link at the
bottom of the category page. You can find more about submitting to Yahoo here.
Yahoo handpicks all it’s sites, so there is no guarantee you’ll get in. You can
also pay to be submitted faster with the Business Express option. It costs $299,
but there is still no guarantee you’ll get in. You can find the Business Express
criteria here.
There is also no guarantee when you’ll get in. It can take days, weeks, or months.
But be prepared when you do get in. Yahoo will bring a wealth of traffic to your
site. - Alta Vista – Alta
Vista is a much easier site to submit to. In order to submit, all you have to
do is visit this page,
which can also be found on the bottom of the Alta Vista home page under the link
‘Add a Page.’ With Alta Vista, you simply submit the URL of your page, and it
does the rest. You must make sure that you include your META keywords. Alta Vista
has some heavy restrictions regarding spamming, which we will cover later, so
be careful. They also have a nice FAQ
for more information. The good thing about Alta Vista is that the submittal process
is pretty quick. They’ll have your site up there within a day or two. - Lycos – You may have seen the commercials
with the Dog. Lycos is becoming one of the top engines. In fact, recently they
were reported as receiving more hits than Yahoo. To add your site on Lycos, visit
this URL, or the link from their
home page that reads ‘Add a Site.’ Like Alta Vista, they spider your site to check
changing content and META tags. Lycos takes about 2-3 weeks to register your site,
but sometimes it can be quicker. - Excite
– Excite is an extensive search engine which has been in the news lately with
their new voice capability. To submit to Excite, visit the ‘Add URL link off their
homepage or click here. Excite
also spiders your page occasionally, checking for changed content, etc. It takes
about 2 weeks to get your site listed. - HotBot
– HotBot is part of the Wired Digital family, home of many other web resources,
including our favorite, Webmonkey.
To add your URL to HotBot, click on the AddURL button the left panel of their
home page, or visit here. HotBot
works similarly to other engines. You can find out more information by visiting
this page. - Webcrawler – To add to Webcrawler
simply click on the Add your URL link off the home page, or visit here.
You simply add your URL, your e-mail and a broad category for your site to be
included in. Webcrawler indexes sites by their TITLE. If you have no title on
your page, Webcrawler will display a blank URL - Northern
Light – Northern Light is among my favorite Search Engines. Compared to others
it has a very uncluttered interface, and is pleasing to navigate through. It is
also pleasing to register. Click on the link from the home page or here.
Northern Light’s Robot, Gulliver, will spider your site occasionally. Northern
Light only accepts one page per site, but Gulliver will extract other subpages
into the directory. - Infoseek
– Infoseek is part of the ever expanding GO Network. To submit to Infoseek, you
simply click on the ‘Add URL link, or click
here. At the time of this writing, Infoseek is not accepting submissions via
the Add URL page, due to some restructuring. Currently they are accepting submissions
only via e-mail. If this is still the case when you are ready to submit, instructions
will be on the Add URL page. - Looksmart
– Looksmart is similar to Yahoo in that it hand selects the sites that appear
in its directory. With Looksmart, you also have to navigate to the category that
you wish to submit to. From the category, there is a simple SUBMIT button. There
are limited categories compared to Yahoo, but you are allowed to submit your site
to multiple categories.
How To Submit Your Site to the ‘Major’ Search Engines
Now that you have a starting
place, you might be asking how you’re going to find the time to submit to all
these sites. You don’t actually have to. With some sites such as Yahoo and Looksmart,
you have to submit manually, but other sites can be submitted to either by software
or by a free service. There are some nice submission software packages out there.
For the big sites, I recommend against this practice. Each site has specific criteria
as to how your site is displayed, and it’s a good practice to cater to that criteria
in order to insure a high listing. If you, however, don’t have the time then you
don’t have the time. Pay your 30 buckaronis and submit away.
Actually
maintaining a top search engine position is a fine art. One could spend all their
available time on getting and staying listed, yet still not be as high as they
possibly could. The fact is people, it’s not going to happen. It’s best to worry
about the biggie engines, and forget about the rest. However you submit your site,
it’s a good idea to resubmit it every 3 months or so, but beyond that you’re better
off letting it go. Worry about your sites content, which after all is more important,
right?
You can find more information on Search Engine strategies
at the Search Engine
Watch, an invaluable resource.
