Website submission

[holistic]

Hi all,
I am in the process of setting up a website and would like some advice on how to sucessfully submit it, (once finished) to internet search engines.

I haven't a clue where to start, any tips or advice from the professionals?

Thanks for any help!

Sara

[DuaneJackson]

Hi Sara,

Firstly, welcome to the site. I hope you stick around - it's a very interesting and useful place.

First thing to do is to submit to to dmoz.org.

There's a school of thought that says it's better to be 'found' by the search engines than to 'tell' them about yourself. In other words, instead of submitting your site, makes sure it's found by search engines following links from other sites it already knows about.

There are a number of free direcotries out there to which you can submit your site. Concentrate on the ones that are relavent to your sector first. And also avoid any that have a zero pagerank.

If you're not sure what page rank is go to http://toolbar.google.com and download and install their toolbar. Every site you visit will have a ranking on 0 to 10 that is displayed in a green bar within the toolbar.

Hope that helps, and I'm sure others will be along shortly to ofrfer advice too.

[Quan]

Yes or you could check at www.pagerank.net You could invest in Google ad words. Its pay per click. Be wise and choose only keywords very pertinent to your business since you would want good targeted advertising and wouldn't want people to just click on your ad to waste you money. Or you could do link exchanges with other related sites with a relatively high PR to get more Google bots to pick up your site via links on other sites (like Duane Jackson mentioned).

[Juvanescence]

You might find this tool (http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php) useful for submitting your site. :D

[Richard Conyard]

Are you sure about DMOZ - may be it's the categories, may be it's the way I submit URLs, but either way it's a right pain to get anything up there.

I even volunteers to help manage a section and didn't get a response!

[DuaneJackson]

DMOZ is the starting point for many search engines, google included. If you only ever submit to one ditrectory then this should be the one.

It's a huge site and they get hundred of people offering to be editors for categories (often with ulterior motives), it's bad that they didn't respond though.

There are soem criteria you have to meet to get included, but aslong as it's a legit site and you submot to a relevant category you should eventually get included. The problem is that some of the editors are lazy!

[Richard Conyard]

I appreciate that DMOZ is important - it's just often damn near impossible to get listed in there.

[Ravenfire]

Hi and welcome Sara

I must admit I find the same with DMOZ :)

[Amber]

There's no doubt that if you can get listed in DMOZ it can really help your rank, but it IS all but impossible to get listed in some of the categories, for the reasons already given.

Personally I would recommend concentrating on getting quality content onto your website, and optimising it for your chosen key words. If you can create a site which is a quality resource, people will start linking to it and it will eventually get listed. Content is king: if you don't have good content, you can submit your site to every search engine you can find and it won't do you much good.

Submitting to directories etc can also work, but we've found one of the most effective ways of improving our search engine ranks is to write articles and distribute them on article distribution sites. That has worked well for us.

[DuaneJackson]

If you can create a site which is a quality resource, people will start linking to it and it will eventually get listed.

I'd second that, we've seen lots of sites wherby adding quality information gets people linking to it of their own accord and this helps a hell of a lot with search engine rankings.

[broadband-engine]

Hi

Before I start this is not going off-thread. Some good resources for finding link partners I have found is
www.linkmetro.com and www.link-vault.com - the first is a well organised exchange and link-vault.com is based on a php script and it places links into your pages. Both are very good systems. Being 'found' by search engines is more likely when you have a good network of recipricated links. That is all I ever do and it works for my sites.

For info on how the directories and search engines interact look at this amazing interactive diagram

http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

Cheers