The Right Way to Submit Your Site.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 13-10-2009

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Are you going to submit your site to the search engines the right way or the wrong way? To do it right, you need to know what youre doing, and your site needs to be optimized before you take it anywhere near a search engine.

How can you know if your site is ready? You consider these things before you submit. Have you included your keywords in your title tag, description, and content? Make sure youre tightly focused on only one or two keywords. You should also check for broken links, as these can cause big problems with search engines spiders.

Once youve submitted your site, you need to be prepared to wait. The chances that you won’t be added to any engine’s database for at least a month.

The Rules of Submission.

1. Theres no need to submit more than once. Despite the hype, you should never resubmit your site unless it gets dropped entirely. This doesnt apply to new pages, however. If you have created a few hundred pages in the last month or so and you dont think that they will be indexed quickly enough via links to them it is a good idea to submit them manually rather than waiting for your site to be indexed again. If you are using a Google Site map, simply adding them to this document will get them indexed pretty quickly.

2. Do it right the first time: be thorough when submitting, especially to directories. Take the time to research and find the most appropriate category for your site. If your site would fit into multiple categories find out what the policy is on multiple submissions. Some directories want you to submit to every relevant category, others want no more than one submission or they reject all submissions. Some want every page, others (most) want your index page and nothing more.

3. Be brief when you describe your site: get right to the point in two short sentences. Most directories will actually restrict the number of characters that you can use. If they dont it is still a good idea to try to wrap it up within twenty-five to thirty words. This is one of the largest differences between directory listings and search engine listings. In the directory you only get a short line to attract visitors; this is static for every visitor.

4. Be as accurate as you can. Dont try to trick people into visiting your site, as itll only backfire. Most directories are actually monitored by a team of editors. These editors will visit your link and red flag you if you are trying to deceive visitors or if you are trying to cheat in any other way. When it comes to directory listings, there are even less avenues for cheaters than there are in search engine listings as directories are checked out by hand.

5) Make sure that all your information is relevant, and try to make it appealing to humans as well as dense with keywords. Directories dont care about your key words very much. If your site isnt attractive to human beings it will be listed poorly. When human beings edit, human beings rank, and human beings get what they want.

6) Be patient: good things come to those who wait. Let the search engines take their time.

7) Dont submit any more than your homepage. The crawlers are quite capable of following your links and indexing your whole site from just your homepages URL.

If youre submitting you site to the DMOZ directory, follow these steps. If one doesnt work, wait a while and then do the next.

1. Submit your site.

2. Write a follow-up email to the categorys editor, explaining that youve been waiting and would like to know your sites status.

3. Email the next category editor up, in case theres a problem with your categorys editor.

4. Seek assistance at the Open Directory Projects public forum.

5. Email DMOZ senior staff seeking help. This is pretty much the last resort.

Submissions can be time consuming at first, but youll quickly get it down to a science. If you work hard on your SEO before you submit your site then you can get to the top more quickly than youd think.

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

Filed Under (SEO Basics) by admin on 11-09-2009

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It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so dont create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.