Registering with Search Engines

Rather than wait for the search engines to find you, you can go to the search engine sites and register with them. Copy the content from your meta tags Description and Keywords into a text file without the arrow brackets and quotes. This will expedite the process of filling out the forms when you go to register the web site with the search engines. The forms you fill out will only allow a brief description (two or three sentences) and in most cases no more than 25 keywords.

Registering the site

Among the the choices that must be made on the forms is in what Category to list your site. For your first submission choose the one you feel is the best fit. For subsequent submissions, you may want to consider the next best fit. Keep track of the Categories and dates of your registration.

Be sure and inform your client that it may take four to six weeks before your site shows up in the search directories. Additionally, there is no guarantee that the site will even list you. Submitting too often to a directory is not recommended, however, after about five weeks it wouldn't hurt to reapply and continue to do so every few months especially if you have made some additions to the site contents or purpose.

I have spent 10 hours submitting to various search engines for a single site with little if any results. Which brings me to the following conclusion. I strongly suggest that you recommend to your client that they use a search engine's "express service". In essence you pay them to look at your submission. Yahoo currently charges $299 for this service for a 7-day response time. Be sure and explain to your client that even this does not guarantee placement in the search directory. Further details are available from Yahoo! Suggest Site. http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/suggest.html

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