E-Commerce Fundamentals (XIII) - How to submit your site to search engines

We have discussed at length how to prepare your site for search engine submission using meta tags. Now that your site is ready for submission, let us discuss various options and resources available in the Net.

How to Register

There are mainly three ways you can submit your site to search engines:

1. Manually submit sites to search engines

In this method, you visit a search engine, check its submission guidelines, look for 'Add URL' button, click it and fill out the submission form.

This is a tedious but very effective way of submitting sites. Use this method to submit sites to major search engines (some of which are listed below)

http://www.altavista.com
http://www.aol.com
http://www.deja.com
http://www.excite.com
http://www.alltheweb.com
http://www.google.com
http://www.hotbot.com
http://www.infoseek.com
http://www.looksmart.com
http://www.lycos.com
http://www.magellan.com
http://www.metacrawler.com
http://www.msn.com
http://www.northernlight.com
http://www.WhatUseek.com
http://www.webcrawler.com
http://www.yahoo.com
etc.

The Indian Search Engines are:

http://www.rediff.com
http://www.yahoo.co.in
http://www.123india.com
http://www.khoj.com
http://www.indiatimes.com
http://www.jadoo.com
etc.

2. Use Site Submission Service

There are many paid-for and few free sites that will submit your site to search engines. Most such sites have two levels: a free and a pay level. In free level you'll get 20 or so search engines for free submission. If satisfied with the result, you may opt for pay level to submit your site to thousands of search engines. A few examples of such sites are:

Get Submitted
Free search engine submission site. One has to register as member before using their services. Among very few sites who are still providing totally free submission service.

Auto Submit
Allows free site submission to 20 sites.

Self Submit
Allows free site submission to 16 sites.

Add Me
Allows free submission to upto 20 search engines/directories

Submit-It
Payment-based search engine submission service

Submit Express
submits website URL to 40 top search engines for free.

U Submit
Registers website with 27 of the top Search Engines and 1354 Link Listings on the Internet Free.

3. Search Engine Submission Software

This is a software to be installed in your PC. After connecting to Internet, this software will send a robot or spider to submit your site to selected search engines. This is a very handy process if you are submitting many web-pages to large number of search engines at regular intervals. A few examples of such software are:

SoftSpider
Spider-based Search engine submission tool. Submits to 9,000+ promo sites.

Submission-Spider
A suite of search engine submission tools.

TrafficSeeker
In addition to site submission, it has a built in scheduler, meta tag creator, link popularity checker, Doorway page creator, FTP Uploader etc.

Add Engine

IMPORTANT:

Above list of free or paid for sites/software is an illustrative one. There are many more such products/ services. We have not done any evaluation - please exercise usual precautions before paying for a product or service.

Related Links:

Source: FAIDA - Newsletter on Business Opportunties from India and Abroad Vol: 2, Issue 30 January 3' 2002

Author : Dr. Amit K. Chatterjee
(Amit worked in blue-chip Indian and MNCs for 15 years in various capacities like Research and Information Analysis, Market Development, MIS, R&D Information Systems etc. before starting his e-commerce venture in 1997. The views expressed in this columns are of his own. He may be reached at amit@infobanc.com )


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