Submitting Your Site!
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Let's say you've got your site all set up ready for submitting, Right? Well, marketing of your Web site is not much different than marketing any other product, service or event. The same basic rules apply, however, there are some specifics about the Internet and the World Wide Web that may require a little research and self-education on your part. The one major difference is the cost. Armed with a little knowledge, you can very effectively market your Web site for a reasonable cost or no cost at all!
There are many opinions on the subject of submitting your site. Some say it's best to use a "Mass Submission Program", whereas some say that submitting by hand is best. I believe in "GET THE JOB DONE WELL", but in this tutorial, I am not going to say that "this is the way to do it", or "you should never do it like this". I am simply going to show you the pros and cons of each method of doing it. After we have talked about each, I will show you how to go about doing each type of submitting.
Mass Submitting
First, what is Mass Submitting? Mass Submitting is where you use a program that will submit your site to all the major search engines, and usually quite a few besides.
The Pros:
 | It is very fast. No more late nights spent submitting your site by hand. Usually, you just fill out one form, press a button, and it's done. |
| Besides submitting your site to "The Big Eight", they will usually also submit your site to hundreds of smaller directories, that you would never have had time to submit to in the past. They can often produce a bit of extra traffic for your site. |
The Cons:
| Let's use Broadcaster (a mass submission program) at http://www.broadcaster.co.uk for this example. Now, one of the directories they submit your site to is Yahoo. When you fill in the "master form", it asks you what category you want your site to be placed in on that directory. They only have about 50 choices. Think of Yahoo, and the hundreds of categories available. This is not what you would call fine tuned targeting. It is much the same for a lot of the other search engines and directories. |
| They don't do as good a job. For this one, I'm speaking generally. For example, if I submit my site, and something happens in the submission process (for instance, it can't connect to the search engines server), it probably won't try again. Also, what if the search engine has changed the page you need to go to to submit? |
Hand Submitting
Hand submitting is where you submit your site by hand to the search engines, one engine at a time.
The Pros:
| It is much, much, much more accurate. You will get much better results if you go this way, I can guarantee it. The reason? You are able to optimize your site to get the best listing on a particular search engine. Tip: Use RankThis to determine your ranking on all the major search engines. Also, you will get put in the right category! You don't know how huge a difference this can make... |
The Cons:
| It can take quite a long time to do it. It won't take you long to submit to only "The Big Eight", but if you want to submit to any other ones, it can start to take a while. |
Which Is Best For You?
For some people, the "quick n easy" way might be best. They might not have the time to submit to all the search engines by hand (either that, or they couldn't be bothered). They might not care if it doesn't get the best results, just so long as it gets them a bit of extra traffic. If that is you, you should consider this option. There are many free submission programs out there!
For other people, however, the hand submission method might be the better option. It gives better results, even if it does take a while to do. They like to do a good job at the ones that count; the "Big Eight". You may be asking by this point, "what does he mean when he keeps referring to "The Big Eight"? I'll tell you. "The Big Eight" are the eight largest search engines, namely:
Infoseek Alta Vista Excite HotBot Lycos Yahoo OpenText Webcrawler
If you can get a good listing in these eight seach engines, you should be pretty well off traffic wise.
There is a third group of people that I haven't talked about yet. It is the group of "in betweeners" who like the accuracy of hand submissions to submit to "The Big Eight", but like the speed and simplicity of Mass Submission Programs to submit to all the rest. This is a pretty good way to do it as in most cases the hundreds of small search engines out there don't require more than your email address and URL. These can be done with a Mass Submission Program to save time, and you probably won't notice much difference in the quality of the submission.
The choice is yours. Just remember though: If you make a mistake in submitting your site, it can take months to fix it. So make your decision carefully.
I hope this tutorial has helped you in submitting to the search engines. If you still have questions, however, please just send me an email at rickshelp@home.com. I would be happy to try to answer any questions you may have.
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