Submitting to Search Engines

As you already know, crawler-based search engines use software called spiders to regularly surf the Web, find new sites and pages, and add to their index, which is done for free. This means that, unlike directories, you are likely to have several if not many pages listed with them. However, in several cases, discussed in the introduction to this Step, you might want to use submission as a safety net against having your site forgotten by a search engine. But before submission it is recommended to make sure that your website is properly optimized. Look through your title, meta description and meta keywords in order to be sure they properly describe your Web pages and are correctly optimized for your keywords. So, here we give you the guidelines for submitting to the three major crawler-based engines Google, Yahoo! and Bing (former MSN and Live Search) which is enough to bring you the desired traffic.

Submitting To Google

Google is one of the most important crawler-based search engines because over 70% of Web searches are made through its portal. Besides this, it feeds search results to several other widespread and prominent search services (see Part 1 for a refresher on relationships between search engines).

Google’s Web submission interface is currently located at: http://www.google.com/addurl/ (page submission). You can also sign in to your Google account, go to Google Webmaster Tools and submit an xml sitemap of your site.

The good thing is that if you submitted your site to the major directories (like DMOZ and Yahoo!) and got listed with one of them, Google and other crawlers are guaranteed to pick up that URL. This means you may not need to do additional work to get listed with crawlers.

Google, however, still provides an “Add URL” page that lets you to submit a URL directly to its crawler. Again, there’s no guarantee that Google will actually include the submitted URL to its database after your submission; on the other hand, chances are that it will. Despite this, it makes sense to submit your home page and perhaps one or two other URLs residing within your domain with the help of the “Add URL” page.

You really don’t need to submit more than this. The only reason for submitting some of your internal pages is in the event that there is a problem reaching your home page. This gives Google an alternative route into your site. From whatever page it visits, it will look for links to your other pages and perhaps include those. This is true for other crawlers as well.

If you have a brand new website, it will probably take about a month before Google lists your Web pages. Because of this, you might consider making use of its paid placement program.

Submitting To Yahoo!

Yahoo!, aside from being one of the largest directories on the net, is an important crawler-based search engine used by many people from all around the world through its regional branches. It provides the main results for several other services (see Part 1 for a refresher on relationships between search engines).

Yahoo’s Web submission interface is located at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html. If you follow the top link named ‘Submit Your Site for Free’, you will be able to submit your site home page, or submit an xml sitemap to have Yahoo’s bot crawl your site faster. Mind that suggesting your site for inclusion in Yahoo! Search requires registration.

As with Google, building links is the best way to get listed for free. A free URL submission plan offered by Yahoo! does not guarantee you will be listed at all, though most probably you will. Submit according to the same instructions as for Google.

First, you’ll need a Yahoo! account to submit to the Yahoo! search engine. As with Google, building links is the best way to get listed for free. Yahoo! also offers a free URL submission plan which does not guarantee you will be listed at all, though most probably you will. Submit according to the same instructions as for Google.

If you don’t get picked up for free, Yahoo! has affordable paid inclusion programs that guarantee to quickly add the pages you submit. The drawback is that the most affordable paid listing program offered by Yahoo! includes a pay-per-click feature which means you are charged every time someone clicks on your listing. If you run out of money, your listing may be dropped. However, there’s still a good chance that even if you do run out of money, you’ll continue to be listed for free.

By the way, Yahoo’s crawler incorporates technology from three different crawlers that it purchased in 2002 and 2003: Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST’s AllTheWeb. Any references you hear about those crawlers are now superseded by the single Yahoo! crawler. Once successfully submitted to Yahoo! Web Search you will get listed on these search engines too.

Submitting to Bing

Bing Web submission interface is located at: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx. It also offers Webmaster Tools to submit the sitemaps, view statistics about your sites and other options. Surely you need a registration to use these tools.

Today, it’s the third most popular search engine in the world. It is using crawler based on MSNbot. Bing spiders, like those of Google, find new sites by following links directed to those sites. Bing spiders are very active and due to this Bing managed to compile a really large website database and it now exceeds 5 billion indexed pages. One of Bing’s peculiarities is its decision to drop paid inclusion listings. Bing looks at the content of the site and this determines greatly the site’s ranking. Additionally, site update frequency is also taken into consideration. The more your site is active the more frequently it is crawled and as a result – the higher ranking it achieves.

If you are not eager to wait until the spider finds your site on the web you can go to the “Add URL” page and manually submit it. All you need to do is to submit your URL directory and wait for the crawler.

To sum up, be patient. Do not be nervous if you don’t see immediate results. This is normal that some time passes before your site submitted to a search engine appears on the result pages. For Bing this time period is about 6 weeks, for Yahoo! – 8-12 weeks, for Google – 3 months. As for the Google period, it generally takes a year to attain really worth speaking of search results. It’s a rather long period to wait but in response Google will give you more than a half of all traffic.