Chapter Five... The All Important Search Engine Submission Chapter
In this chapter I'll be talking about search engine submission.
Search engine submission is a great way to gain steady site traffic very cheaply.
According to Media Metrix, 85-95 percent of all internet traffic comes from the top 10-12 search engines.
That means that the vast majority (millions and millions) of people find sites by seeing them listed at the major search engines.
If you can get your site listed on those major search engines, you can get a piece of that traffic.
Plus search engine traffic is highly targeted!
We'll pretend you have a site about Dogs. When a person goes to the search engines and types in the word "dog" a link to your site will appear leading them straight to you. You can't get any more targeted than that.
How do you get listed on those major search engines?
That's the hard part. Getting your site listed at the major search engines is almost a science in itself. There's an entire industry of experts who get paid for doing nothing more than getting people's web sites listed at the search engines.
People charge a lot of money to do this for you. Anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousands dollars. Most also charge maintenance fees of several hundred dollars per month to make sure that your site stays listed at the top of the search engines.
(this is because each month, as other people submit their sites to be listed, YOUR site can get pushed further down the list. You need to resubmit your site every month to keep a high listing).
Very few beginners can afford to pay this kind of cash, plus it's hard to even find a good company to handle this work for you. You never know who the real search engine submission experts are.
To get around this problem, a number of companies sell search engine submission software that allows anyone, even a beginner, to successfully submit their sites to the search engines and get a good ranking.
I'll talk about the best of these tools later on. I highly recommend you purchase the software to do this. The software costs just a fraction of what you would have to pay a professional and is worth every penny.
First we need to talk about search engine optimization.
You must optimize your site in order to get it listed on the search engines. This means you have to add a few things to your web site so that it has the best chance of getting listed at the search engines.
Search engines optimization is no big deal if you know what to do...and I'm going to tell you everything you need to know.
The first thing is Meta Tags.
Meta Tags
What are meta tags? Meta tags are small HTML tags that you place on your web page. When you submit your site to the search engines, the search engines send automated robots, called spiders, to your web site.
The spiders automatically scan all the content of your site. They then take this information and use it to determine where to list you on their search engine.
If you have a site about dogs for instance, the spiders will scan your site, see that it is about dogs, and report to the search engine that your site should be listed under the dogs category.
One of the main things the spiders check is your meta tags. These tags tell the spiders what your site is all about.
There are 2 tags you should have, the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag.
As the names suggest, these two tags tell the search engines a description of your site and suggest some keywords to list your site under.
These two tags look like this, and should be placed between your web pages <head> and </head> tag:
<meta name="description" content="Dog World, Learn about dog breeds, buy dog toys, get advice on dog training, read about different dog foods">
<meta name="keywords" content="Dogs, Dog Training, Dog Health, Dog Toys, Pet, Dog breeding, Dog breeds, Dog Food, Personalized Dog Collars">
Notice that the keywords in the keywords meta tag are separated by commas.
It's pretty straight forward. The search engine submission tool I'll be recommending later in the chapter has a built in Meta Tag creator that will make sure that you've built your meta tags correctly.
Meta tags aren't the only thing spiders look for on your site. They also check your site Title. By title, I mean whatever you have written in your title tag on your web page.
<html>
<head>
<title>Joe’s Dog World Web Site</title>
<meta name="description" content="Dog World, Learn about dog breeds, buy dog toys, get advice on dog training, read about different dog foods">
<meta name="keywords" content="Dogs, Dog Training, Dog Health, Dog Toys, Pet, Dog breeding, Dog breeds, Dog Food, Personalized Dog Collars">
</head>
See the <title> and </title> tag above? The words between those two tags are your site’s title. In this case, its Joe’s Dog World Web Site.
Since the spiders check this and use what they find to help determine where to list your site at the search engines, you should use your keywords in your title. For this site, I would use something like this as my title:
<title>Dog World - Dogs, Dog Training, Dog Health, Dog Toys, Pet, Dog breeding, Dog breeds, Dog Food, Personalized Dog Collars </title>
Do you see how I used the keywords from my keyword meta tag in the title? You should do this same thing.
The spiders also look at the text content of your site. They look at all the words on your web page. We call the words on your web page it's "copy". So incorporate your keywords throughout your site's copy.
Link Popularity
Many search engines will also look at how popular your site is and take that into account when determining how high up the list to rank your site.
How do they determine how popular your site is? They look at how many other sites are linking to you. Their spiders, when checking a web site, also check all the links on the web site.
If lots of other sites are linking to your site, the spiders will determine your site is more popular.
In my opinion, that's a little silly, but that's what the search engines do.
As a new web site, you may not have many other sites linking to your site. The way to fix this is to post on message boards and guest books across the Internet.
Find message boards where people discuss topics similar to your site. Jump into any conversations on the message boards, or start your own conversations. At the end of each message you post, put a link to your web site.
Next submit those message board pages to the search engines. The search engines will send their spiders to those message boards, see your links to your site, and give your own site a higher link popularity!
The Most Important Search Engine Optimization Tip
You'll notice that everything so far has had to deal with your keywords. Using them in the keyword meta tag, using them in your site's title, and using them throughout your site's copy.
That's because the keywords you choose are the most important part of search engine optimization.
You have to pick the right keywords or all your work will be for nothing.
Why is this? Let's say you choose a keyword that no one searches for at the search engines. If no one searches for that keyword, then no one will see your site listed at the search engines and therefore no one will come to your web site!
But HOW do you know which keywords will attract the most people?
If you knew that, then you could make a fortune right? If you knew how many times per month that someone searched for a certain keyword at the search engines, you could use that keyword throughout your site's meta tags, site title and site copy, and therefore get listed at the search engines under that keyword, and therefore get a whole lot of site traffic.
Right? Yes, that's right.
You must choose keywords that get searched for often at the search engines. Period.
There's one tool out there that actually shows you how many times any particular keyword gets searched for. This tool is priceless, and you simply have to have it in order to pick the right keywords.
It's actually part of a search engine submission software (so you can kill two birds with one stone).
It's called the Submission-Spider and it will allow you to:
- Submit Your site to the top 10-12 search engines automatically and correctly
- Creates Site Meta Tags automatically and correctly
- Shows you if your site is listed at the search engines under any keyword you ask it, and also shows what position your site is listed under (like if it's the 30'th site listed under the word "Dog" it will tell you that so that you know to optimize your site better so that you can move up to the top 10 sites listed etc).
- Shows you how many other people are linking to your web site. (the more people that link to you, the higher your site will get listed at the search engines)
- AND the all important keyword analysis tool which will show you how often any keyword you ask it gets searched for each month..
There's also other cool stuff in the software, but we don't need to really talk about it because it doesn't pertain to this.
Anyway, you need to get a hold of a copy of this software asap. It's got everything you need to optimize your site correctly, and to submit it to all the major search engines correctly. Plus it costs a fraction of the amount of most major search engine submission software out there, which in themselves are a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional to do this stuff for you.
It's priced at $99 on the main Submission-Spider.com web site but you can get it at over half that price at:
http://www.SubmissionPro.com (more info)
Where you can get it for only $39.90
I don't know how long that discount sale price will last so you should head over there right away and take advantage of it.
Believe me, you'll get many many times the cost of the software out of it in site traffic from the search engines. Where else can you get something that will provide unlimited traffic to all your web sites forever for less than 40 bucks?
The software comes with free tech support. These guys are great, and will help you promote your site with their software. They make sure you get listed at the search engines using the software.
You can use the software on all your sites forever. Buy it now, it's probably even tax deductible as a business expense.
Some Search Engine Submission Pitfalls To Avoid
There are some things to steer clear of. Most of these things won't pertain to you, but I thought I would discuss them anyway just to be sure.
Spam. Search Engines hate spam. How does one spam the search engines? Well for one, by listing hundreds and thousands of keywords in your keyword meta tag. Search engines frown upon this.
I recommend you keep your keywords to about 20-30 different keywords in your keyword meta tag. That number is perfectly acceptable to the search engines.
Keywords can be single words like dog or phrases like dog collars. Phrases can be counted as one keyword when determining how many keywords to list...so "dog collars" would be counted as one keyword.
Another way to spam the search engines (and this is the big one) is to submit your site to the search engines dozens of times per day. Some people set up programs that will submit their sites thousands of times a day hoping to get listed higher. The only thing these people will get is banned from the search engines!
Submit your site once or twice a month (I recommend once every 3 weeks) and you will have nothing to worry about.
If you're using a professional tool to do all your search engine submission like the Submission-Spider you won't have anything to worry about.
Some people claim that submitting your web site to the search engines by hand works better than using software to do it.
By submitting by hand, I mean physically going to each search engine with your web browser, reading through their pages of terms and conditions and rules, finding their submission pages, then filling out the long submission forms by hand.
Back in the dark ages of the internet this used to be true because search engine submission software was crude (this was several years ago). Now though it's completely false.
Search engine submission software has advanced by leaps and bounds since then. Now, submitting your web site using software is no different than doing it by hand as far as the search engines are concerned, and its much quicker, and much easier on you.
Plus if you use software to submit your site, you know that you're doing it correctly.
As a final thought on search engine submission I would like to say this. Is search engine submission the end all be all of web site promotion? No it's not. You'll want to focus more on other methods mentioned in this book.
But search engine submission is certainly something that you'll want to keep a handle on. That's why I recommend picking up software to handle all the search engine submission stuff for you, so you'll be free to work on other aspects of promotion.
Get your site listed, spend a few days each month monitoring it and maintaining your listing, but don't focus completely on it and neglect some of the other tactics from this book.
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