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Search Submit Services
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The purpose of this document is to provide you with background information on search engine technology and some Tips on how to get your Web site to appear on the result pages of search engines and directories. We are by no means promising any miracles. However, this information will help you better understand search engines and directories and will hopefully serve to put you in a better position than you currently are in now.
Search engines utilize indexing software agents often called robots or spiders. These agents 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. Robots will then revisit your site periodically to refresh the recorded information. The revisiting of links is the reason why some search engines don't require you to inform them of dead links. Eventually, their robot would try unsuccessfully to update the information on a dead link and realize it no longer exists. Finally, an easy way to tell whether a Web index is a search engine as opposed to another type of directory is by the information it requires when adding your URL. A true search engine will only need the Web address. The indexing agent takes care of the rest. 2. How do search engines differ from directories, announcement sites, and guides on the Web? Directories: Announcement
Site: Guides & Cool
Sites: 3. General Tips for Getting Listed in Search Engines Each search engine looks at different elements of your page, therefore we highly recommend implementing as many of these Tips as possible. a. Use keywords in the <TITLE> of your document making it as descriptive as possible. When visiting your site, an agent will go first to the <TITLE> tag. For clarification purposes, the <TITLE> tag is what a browser will display in its title bar and is not simply the first line of HTML that shows up on your page. (Although your first words of introductory text should be descriptive as well). Search engines will display the text located between the <TITLE> tags when your web page is listed in a search. By making your <TITLE> descriptive, you'll be better off than those who only have keywords within the text of their page. It will also be helpful when people bookmark your web site. If a more descriptive name appears in a person's hotlist, it will be easier to find your site at a later date. For example, instead of using <TITLE> Suncorp </TITLE> as the title of Suncorp's home page, <TITLE> Suncorp: Tanning Supplier </TITLE> would be much more descriptive. It would also place greater emphasis or relevancy on "Tanning Supplier" when calculating keywords. b. Descriptive Page Text Search engines assign greater relevancy to text located at the top of a page than to text located in the middle or at the bottom of the page. The search engines assume that web page authors will present their most important information first. If your page has a main graphic at the top, you should place some descriptive text either underneath or beside the image. The search engines will index this text and assign it a high level of relevancy. c. Use <META> tags which allow you to provide even more detail about your Web pages and thereby gain greater control over how your pages are indexed. Not all search engines make use of <META> tags, but adding these tags to your pages will make them more accessible to the search engines that do. <META> tag codes are inserted within the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags. The basic syntax is: <META name="description" content="a health and fitness center located in Atlanta"> This will control what appears as the summary of your Web page and will be displayed after the title of your document in the index listing. The content of the description should clearly convey what one can expect to find when linking to your site. <META name="keywords" content="running, weight control, nutrition, aerobics, cholesterol, Georgia"> This will allow you to provide extra information about your page to the search engines without it being visible to the reader. While search engines do take these keywords into account when indexing your page, they are still going to index the entire contents of your page as many sites do not include <META> tags. Since this is the case, there is no need to be redundant. Include keywords that will not necessarily be derived when a robot visits your site. In other words, "health" and "fitness" need not be included in your list of keywords as it is part of your <TITLE>. Robots index both the description and keyword <META> tag contents as searchable words. Hence, your site will come up in a search if someone typed in "nutrition" or "health center" from your description. One way to maximize the usefulness of keywords is to incorporate singular and plural cases of words as well as active and passive verbs. For example, diet, diets, and dieting will yield similar but somewhat varying results in a search. Since you're able through tags, why not guarantee you come up on all of them. Do not, however, excessively repeat keywords in a keyword <META> tag as search engines may penalize you for this. At present, InfoSeek and Lycos are two such examples and others may adopt similar policies in the future. The penalty will most likely be the spider disregarding the <META> tag and extracting keywords from the content of your page- as is usually the case. However, some Submit It! users have reported being dropped from a search engine's database and felt keyword repetition played a role in the removal of their listing. Who should definitely make use of <META> tags? Sites
using Netscape frames: Sites
using Javascript at the top of their page: d. Use ALT tags especially if your site contains multiple photos or graphic-image maps at the top of your home page. Some search engines will take into account the text within an ALT tag when creating your site's description and keywords. In addition, you will be greatly appreciated by all people who visit your site with their Auto Load Images option turned off or by those who prefer to use character browsers. ALT tags are placed after an image file and generally look like the following: <img src="/images/submits.gif" alt="Submit It! : Web site marketing services and tools."> e. If your site utilizes frames, you should be aware that search engines treat frames as if they are links within your main page. As a result the engines will review and index your main page and, at a later date, return to index each individual frame just as it will return to index all other internal links within your web site. Therefore, in order to have your main page (typically titled index.htm or ) indexed accurately and efficiently, we recommend that you add some descriptive text between the <noframes> and </noframes> tags of the HTML source coding of your main page. The noframes tags are usually placed below your frame set information. The frame set information is designated by <frameset> and </frameset>. This text should include your most important keywords and keyword phrases. Adding this text will provide the search engines with content from which to derive keywords for indexing. After this change has been made to your Web site, the page itself will appear exactly the same to anyone using a browser that supports frames. However, users of browsers that do not support frames (i.e. Netscape 1.0 or lower) will now be able to successfully view your home page. 4. Indexing Characteristics Specific To Individual Search Engines Excite Excite's
software looks for common words or themes within a page. It then
selects sentences for the summary that either contain these words
or convey the overall theme. The words within these sentences are
also used as keywords for which the site can be searched.
The syntax for an <IMG> tag code is: <IMG SRC="/images/clinton.gif" ALT="picture of President Clinton"> InfoSeek
Ultra Lycos The keywords are also chosen via artificial intelligence by Lycos' spider. With this in mind, do not open your page with an image map. If you do, Lycos will not be able to take an abstract for your document. WebCrawler In conclusion, do not make it your goal to appear in the top ten list of every search engine. This would not only be a very difficult task, but would most likely end in disappointment. You are virtually guaranteed to have varying success rates with different search engines due to the collection of variables that play a role in every search result. These variables include size of database, method used for determining relevancy, policy on spamming, use of <META> tags and more. Hence, optimize your listings by capitalizing on the indexing criteria shared by search engines. If you have a favorite or preferred search engine that you feel strongly about being yielded as high as possible in a search, customize your Web pages accordingly. Just keep in mind that this might lessen your perceived relevancy on another. 5. How long does it take a Search Engine to list my site? Many of the search engines take time to list a site. The approximate time it may take a search engine to list your site is: 1-2
weeks: Altavista, Infoseek If after the time listed in the chart above has elapsed and you are still not finding your site listed, you should re-submit your URL to the search engines that do not have your listing. It often takes more than one submission to get the best results. Search engines receive tens of thousands of submissions every day. On days when the submission level is above normal, a certain number of submissions can be received properly but still not get listed. If your listing is not appearing on a certain search engine, you should resubmit it. For the FAQ pages of individual search engines, please see the following links: Altavista 6. Why should I submit inside pages of my site? When considering how many pages of your site to promote, it is important to remember directories generally accept one listing per company. This is usually your home or main page. Search engines index multiple pages within a site, but you cannot control which pages they will index unless you submit the individual URLs (pages). The critical pages to submit are your major topic pages, pages with unique content, or pages that describe a specific product or service. For example, a sports store will have separate pages on basketball, baseball and football which should all be submitted. Another benefit to submitting mulTiple pages in this example is that the basketball page will appear higher in a search for "basketball" than the sports site home page. These pages should also include descriptive title tags and meta tags. In order for site visitors to easily navigate your site, these major topic pages should provide clear links to other topic pages and your home page. 7. How do I optimize my announcement with a directory? Since directories are hierarchical databases organized by subject, subject category selection would logically be the most critical aspect of linking your site to a directory. Give some thought to which category(s) your URL should be placed as this location will ensure the right people (those interested in your site) will be visiting your link. URL registrations can quickly become complex process when every directory contains a different sub-categorization scheme. There unfortunately is no formula or exact method for correctly placing one's site into a subject-oriented guide. However, here are a few Tips:
Yahoo:
8. When will I need to inform search engines and directories of updates to my Web pages? Here are some general rules and indicators for knowing when you need to make updates to your listings. For more detailed information on the process involved in making updates to each directory, consult the Submission Hints and Tips accessible within the Submit It! Gold and Pro versions. For search engines: Make updates to listing:
For directories: Make updates to listing:
Do not make updates to listing:
There are several "tricky" things you can do to try to get your URL listed higher or more times on a search engine results page. We are listing these alternatives, but are in no way recommending them as these Web site promotion methods may be viewed as "cheating" by some members of the Internet community. In fact, some of the search engines are starting to penalize people that use these tricks. The reason why we list these tricks is to help you understand why some sites always show up multiple times or always at the top.
10. How else can I promote my site? For additional information on search engine indexing, check out Internet.com's Search Engine Watch written by Danny Sullivan.
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