How To Submit Your website To The Major Search Engines

How many sales pitches have you seen that mention this: “We’ll submit your website to THOUSANDS of search engines all over the internet to get every possible exposure for only $999.” Umm, not necessary!! There are services that will submit your site to multiple search engines for a fee. You don’t need them! You will probably get better results doing it yourself and it’s free. Submitting your site to the search engines is a smart move even if your marketing is done offline. It’s easy and it can bring additional traffic. Listed below are the engines that account for over 95% of all web search traffic. Getting the engine to scan your site and list it is easy.

Google: Google maintains the largest searchable index of the World Wide Web.

Submission page: http://www.google.com/addurl.html Home page: http://www.google.com/

Tips:

- Google wants only your top-level URL; it’ll spider your site from there. - Users can view a cached copy of your pages through Google’s archive. - If other pages in Google’s index point to your Web site, your rank in Google search results may rise.

Yahoo: Yahoo is the senior Web directory, established in April 1994 as Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

Submission page: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ Home page: http://www.yahoo.com/

Tips:

- Find the Yahoo category best suited to your site before registering. This is part of market research. VERY IMPORTANT. - Is your site commercial, specific to a geographic region, or your own home page? Knowing this will help you make a successful suggestion.

Open Directory Project: The Open Directory Project (ODP) started as newhoo.com in 1998. ODP is among the largest and most frequently updated online directories. AOL and other major portals use ODP content to power their own Web directories.

Submission page: http://dmoz.org/add.html Home page: http://www.dmoz.org/

Tips:

- Links are added and organized by volunteer experts called editors. The editors make sure that links adhere to the policies outlined on the ODP submission page. - You have to find the Open Directory category best suited to your site before asking an editor to include it.

Fast: Fast and Dell offer this enormous full-text search of web content under the moniker “All the Web,” and they want to spider your site as they attempt to create a multibillion-page web index. Results from Fast power other search portals, including Lycos.

Submission page: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request Home page: http://www.alltheweb.com/

Tips:

- Fast spiders audio and video content, in addition to HTML and image content. WONDERFUL!! - Fast supports the Robot Exclusion Protocol for content you do not want indexed. - Fast spiders slowly, retrieving a document from your site no faster than once every five seconds.

AltaVista: Launched in spring 1995 to showcase speedy Digital Alpha computer clusters, AltaVista now offers an enormous index of more than 350 million Web documents.

Submission page: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request Home page: http://www.altavista.com/

Tips:

- Use a title tag, or else AltaVista will return the title of your page as “No Title.” - AltaVista indexes alt tags and encourages the use of keyword and description meta tags by indexing those also.

IAC Search and Media: Includes Ask.com, Excite.com, MyWay.com, iWon.com & more. Innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant information for millions of people every day.

Submission page: To get a human editor to review your site for inclusion, you must send an email to url@askjeeves.com. Be sure to include your website URL and a brief description of your website. Home page: http://www.ask.com

Tips:

- Ask’s Expert Rank algorithm goes beyond link popularity to determine which pages are considered to be experts on the topic of the search. We love that because we teach you to become an expert.

MSN: Microsoft’s answer to the search engine market. You can expect MSN Search to be a major player in this field.

Submission page: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx Home page: http://www.msn.com/

Tips:

- MSN recommends designing your pages with valuable content that your target audience is interested in…DUH! - Keyword density methods are screened and may result in lower ranking. No keyword spam

Do you see how easy this is, and how unnecessary it would be to have a service do it for you? Good, now get out there and makeit happen right now before you procrastinate.

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Dan Dimit was a struggling entrepreneur for years in the learning stages. Now that he has it figured out, his passion is shortening the success time for others from years to months.For more info like this visit his blog. http://www.thefreetrafficformula.com/blog If you’d like free training materials, 2 ebooks, minicourse and access to his Q&A conference calls, go to http://www.thefreetrafficformula.com

-searchspiderz

10 Key Tips on Choosing the Best Hosting Package for You

This is not exactly a "top 10" líst, as all of the following things could easily be listed as the most important consideration. Individuals, small companies and big corporations all need to consider the same things when choosing a hosting package.

The overall "tip" here is that you need to get accurate information to make comparisons among hosts. Therefore, each individual tip is another, separate aspect of the hosting relationship that you need to investigate. You should take them all seriously.

1. Traffic ("data transfer" or "bandwidth") - These terms refer to the amount of information, measured in bytes, that is delivered from your website to visitors. Although you will hear about "unlímited bandwidth", check to see if the same terminology used for marketing purposes is reflected in the contract. In other words, read the contract before signing on the dotted line. Unless you will be uploading photo archives or using your site to swap large files, your small- to mid-size website should normally use no more than 3GB of bandwidth monthly. Watch out for "overage" charges (per additional GB, usually) and consider upgrading your account if the site traffic increases.

2. Disk space - Apply the same skeptical approach to the "unlímited disk space" deals, as you did to the claims about traffic above. Again, the majority of small to mid-size sites need 10-20MB of web space at most, so unless 500MB or "unlímited space" is part of the basic package, don't bite. You can easily determine how much storage you need by checking your file sizes and adding them up - all the HTML pages (which are small) plus all the images (some of which can be big).

3. Uptime ("reliability") – The minimum figure for uptime should be 99%. Today, in fact, that is the minimum advertised amount, as 99.5% or more is referred to all the time. Many people would consider this the most important consideration.

4. Tools and security (FTP, PHP, SSI, etc.) – Some hosts require getting prior approval to install various scripts like CGI or PHP. You would be less constrained with a host that does not make you wait for approval. To properly maintain databases, set up security measures and otherwise customize your site, you need the full tool set. Once you find out what you get in the way of tools, press a bit further and find out about restrictions on their use, if any.

5. Email – What's the use of having a custom-named domain for your business if you continue using Hotmail or other web-based mail applications? Every hosting plan will include e-mail services, allowing you to look and sound like a "real company" with its own e-mail addresses. The quality of such add-ons as auto-responders, mail filters and mailing managers will vary among potential hosts. Don't forget to verify that you will also have "webmail" (web-based access to your mail server) and make sure to evaluate the anti-spam tools that are available.

6. Technical support – As things often break down at the worst possible times, you want tech support available as much as possible. Sometimes "24/7 support" is more like "12/5 support", so find out about coverage on weekends and holidays. It is also important to speak with a human being rather than be stuck in a circle of FAQ pages and e-mail service requests. If you face an emergency that threatens your business, you also want to know that the tech staff is knowledgeable. Ask about their training.

7. Remote controls – It may be called your "control panel", it may be called a "tool kit", but every host will give you utilities with which to manage your account. Often, there is a certain web page established from which to do this. Managing your e-mail, mail accounts, passwords and anti-spam tools are all basic chores for webmasters. With a powerful set of tools, the important control over your business stays in your hands.

8. Server architecture – There are numerous reasons for choosing one type of server over another. If you want to use the ASP web programming language, for example, it is only available on Windows servers. However, cost-wise, it is often better to use a Unix system running Apache server software, which is stable, dependable and lets you manage error pages, block specified IP addresses, stop email harvesting and more, without waiting for your host to approve anything. Also, if yours will be an e-commerce site, you will want to get SSL (Secure Socket Layer), MySQL and shopping cart functionality.

9. Costs and payment plans – Price, quite obviously, is an important factor, but the most expensive hosts are not always the best ones. Consider cost, of course, and beware of dramatic price differentials on what are really quite similar plans. You can pay via annual or quarterly payment plans that will discount the monthly rate, and the more you pay at once (and upfront), the less you will pay per month.

10. Reputation and reviews – Search the Internet and talk to all of your business colleagues. Track down both complaints and praises about your potential hosts, but remember to consider the source of the comments.

You will save yourself a lot of frustration if you do your homework. If you are unclear or uncertain about any of the particulars, ask someone you know who has more expertise for assistance. You can also take the bull by the horns and use the Internet as your school, to learn what you need to know about hosting companies and how they work.

-searchspiderz