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Welcome to Marketing
4
money
A free resource dedicated to
the serious
online marketer
by
CKasso
How to submit your site to the search engines
Search engine
traffic is a very important part of any marketing campaign. If you designed
your website properly based on a certain theme, targeting a specific audience,
with optimized keyword rich content and meta tags, then you are halfway to
getting free targeted traffic.
Targeted traffic is
traffic that is actively looking for what you are offering specifically.
As opposed to buying
traffic in bulk, which, honestly, you have no idea where it came from, search
engine traffic comes from a search that someone performed because they are
looking for a particular product, service or information.
Many of my sites
have never been promoted in any other way. Don't get me wrong, search engine
submission is important, but it is only part of the equation. We will discuss
other ways of getting equally good, targeted traffic in later lessons.
This site for
example, has only been promoted through free search engine submission.
Although you
will find excerpts, articles and links in many places on the web from this
site, these
all stemmed from people finding me through the search engines.
So what is the best way to submit to the search
engines?
There are two basic ways.
One is to manually visit each search engine and fill out their online
submission form, and the other is to use an automated submission tool.
For extreme web
optimization I suggest Web Position Gold,
it's a no brainer and it guarantees results. But for our purposes we'll stick
to free search engine submissions.
Each search engine
will have the option for a free submission, and some offer what is called a
paid inclusion. Let's take Yahoo for example. If you go with the free
submission, it may take up to 2 months before their spider ever visits your
site. Once it visits, there is no guarantee that it will like your site or
ever come back, much less index it.
That's why honest
optimization is required, to make sure the engines like your site.
If you choose the paid inclusion, Yahoo charges you $299.00 to guarantee that
it will spider your site within 2 weeks. It does not however guarantee that it
will like or, again, index your site. I never could justify the cost.
Yahoo now offers an
express inclusion for much less, but that is only to get your main page
indexed. Each subsequent page is an additional charge.
That is an
attractive option if you are in a very unique field or niche and there are not
many competing sites. However for a term such as "marketing" where millions of
top marketers are competing for the top spots, what are the chances of you or
I nabbing it from them?
So, I stick to the
free submissions, exercise patience and do quite well.
In the beginning I
submitted manually. That lasted a very short period of time! It is extremely
time consuming and very tedious. It is possible, many do it, however, I am
always shocked at the amount of webmasters that still do it. Once you
auto-submit, you will kick yourself for ever doing it manually. This is one of
the golden pieces of advice I will offer you. Do not bother submitting
manually.
Remember... if I knew then, what I know Now
I did an experiment,
as I always do, with two websites just to see if there really was such
difference. I used the Alexa
Toolbar we discussed earlier as my gauge. These two sites were very
similar in design and keywords. The content varied, but I think they were
equally matched.
The first site I
finished I manually submitted to the top ten search engines and Indexes. this
took an entire day. The second site was finished a week later and was
automatically submitted to a combination of over 600,000 search engines,
indexes, classified sites, FFa's and link directories. this took 10 minutes!
Here's where it gets
interesting. The first site was originally ranked by Alexa
at 1,505, 987 and the second at 988,098 at the end of that month. By the end
of the second month, without any additional interference the first site was
ranked at 1,484,475 and the second site at 351,623! Well I didn't wait any
longer and immediately submitted the first site also. Both of these sites are
ranked in the 100,000 to 150,000 range now 5 months later.
For my
auto-submitting I use a program
called
AddWeb
Website Promoter,
it comes in many different licenses and offers
many different features. To be honest though, I'm a cheapskate, so I went with
the cheapest version. I almost always go with the cheapest version of
everything in the beginning, if they prove to be useful tools, then and only
then will I consider upgrading. This is one of the only tools I have ever
purchased where the cheapest version does not need to be upgraded!
I get automatic
updates to all the search engines, indexes, link directories, etc you name it,
free each time I use it. It is a desktop application so I don't have to visit
or login to a website. It is a one time payment, not a monthly subscription,
that's important. It allows me to submit up to three websites at a time. More
expensive versions allow more sites, but three at a time is plenty for me. It
keeps track of which sites I submitted to, and prevents me from submitting too
often to sites that have limits, that's called spamming and could get you
banned from the search engine altogether. Well I could go on and on, the
benefits and uses are many, if you're
interested take a look at their site
AddWeb
Website Promoter,
decide for your self, personally I love it!
There are some other
equally as impressive tools out there, I guess it has to do with which one you
choose first? Submit Fire
is a program that came highly recommended from some friends at the forums. I
never tried it but they say it's a very good program. It's hard for me to
recommend too many other programs for search engine submission. Buying
AddWeb
Website Promoter,
was one of the few times I got lucky on the first
shot. Since then I haven't tried anything else.
If nothing else,
please take my advice on this. If you are serious and want your site to be
indexed as quickly, inexpensively and professionally as possible, you must
auto submit. That's it!
Use this tool to
Submit To Over 680,000 Directories Now!
Good Luck in this Marketing Jungle!
CKasso |
