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Search Engine Registration
- Search Engine Registration
- Banner Advertising
- Site Design
Creating an excellent web-site is only part of the battle. Web-site registration is now the next important step, so that people who are looking for your product can locate your web-site. You must register your URL with as many search engines, meta-search engines, and directories as possible. We list here the most important ones and the best ways to promote your site using registration.
Registering you URL with Search Engines
Search engines are a vital part of Internet life. Most often when people surf the Internet, they do not have an absolutely clear or specific idea of what they are looking for. Search engines are the most important and universal tools for helping people find what they want, fast. If you are a business on the internet, you will certainly want people to find you if they are searching for you, whether they search for you specifically or not.
For example, if I am a web-design entrepreneur in Waterloo who wishes to market myself to clients around the world, I should make sure that when people search for 'web design waterloo' or even 'web design company' that I should appear near the top of the rankings. That is not always easy to do. We offer some suggestions and a link to more information below.
Don'ts:
1.
Do not hire anyone to register web pages for you.
If you are savvy enough to have a business web site, you are certainly
savvy enough to register your URL with various search engines. Only hire
someone you know to do this, but really you should not need to. It is
quite simple to do, and does not take that much time. Online submission
services are ineffective and expensive to boot.
2. Do
not register with a million search engines.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people stick with
the most popular engines like Google, Altavista, and Metacrawler. The
reason is simple: they are the best ones. Do not waste your time registering
your business with obscure search engines because nobody will use them.
More importantly, the web is full of 'spiders' that are programmed to
constantly "crawl" the Web in search of new or updated pages. They will
essentially go from URL to URL until they have visited every Web site
on the Internet.
When visiting a Web site, an agent will record the full text of every page (home and sub-pages) within the site. It will then continue on to visit all external links. Following these external links is how search engines are able to find your site regardless of whether or not you register your URL with them. Submitting your URL, however, does speed up the process. It notifies an agent to visit and index your site instead of waiting for it to eventually locate you through one of your external links.
Do:
1.
Register your site with the top 10 search engines.
We list those below for you, with links to each. If there are specialized
search engines that covers only your field, it would help to register
with those as well, but usually there are not. Specialized directories
are much more common, and you should look out for those. Search engines
do not need to restrict their databases to be effective. Google, for example,
is much more likely to be effective than a small search engine. It is
true that some pay-for-use search engines and directories have specialized
information, but most people want free information, and fast. Do not bother
with pay sites.
2.
Concentrate your efforts on getting high rankings on the engines you do
register with.
When it comes to registering search engines, quality outweighs quantity.
A few quality registrations will help you get hits. We outline how to
register your site properly below.
3.
Use many key words and meta tags to help index your site.
When you register your URL with a search engine, you will often be able
to enter key words into the description fields that will help identify
your site. Choose those key words well. Pretend you are using the search
engine to find URLs for your topic and imagine what words you and other
people would use to search. Those often make the best key words.
