STEP 1: Submit Your URLs
Submitting your site to the engines is a tedious affair, because each
engine likes to receive submissions in different ways
-
they each have their own submission pages
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some only want to receive your home page. Some let you submit every page
of your site.
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some allow you to submit many pages in a day, others only one. And, to
make it all nastier, they change policies from time to time!
Still, it’s a necessary task. Yes, there are submission services and software.
But, unless I really know someone, I trust important stuff like this only
to myself. I’d suggest the same for you.
Luckily, a mere few major free Search Engines account, either directly
(through their own search services) or indirectly (through partner sites),
for about 95% of your traffic. Let’s stay on the right side of the 80-20
Rule (actually 95-5 here!) and only submit to them.
Go to the submit URLs of the following engines and research their current
submission policies. Then start submitting
There is no need to submit to any other engines, not even
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AOL Search
your listings are displayed automatically in AOL’s Search Engine when
you bid on keywords at Overture which uses Inktomi for its backup search
results, so you’re covered when you submit to Inktomi via HotBot.
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MSN Search
you are listed automatically in MSN’s Search Engine when you submit
to Inktomi. You submit to the Inktomi index through HotBot or through the
paid inclusion program available at PositionTech.com or NetworkSolutions.com.
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Netscape Search
you are listed automatically in Netscape’s Search Engine when you bid
on keywords at Overture which uses Inktomi for its backup search results,
so you’re covered when you submit to Inktomi via HotBot. Also, Netscape
use Google as a secondary Search Engine. So you’re covered there, too.
Overture’s network partners often only display between the first and third
place listings.
You can no longer batch submit URLS to AltaVista. It has come
up with a creative way to force a human to actually go the submission page
in order to submit, you have to enter the 8 characters from a displayed
graphic into a Submission Code box, then enter your URL and then press
the Submit button.
Check
it out yourself... |
The big problem with all submission software? They don’t tell you the
policies of each engine (how many pages are OK to submit, how often). And,
of course, they don’t tell you whether you’ve been spidered, etc. So it’s
easy to happily batch submit your URLs until you run afoul of the engines
by violating their policies.
STEP 2: Track Engines’ Spiders
Even after you do submit, some of the engines take weeks, even months,
to send their spiders over to your site to bring back the goodies. The
pros don’t wait around. They submit. Then they check their site’s log files,
looking to see which of the major engine’s spiders have visited, and which
pages they took back to their mother ships. If they don’t see an engine’s
spider within a certain amount of time after submitting (varies for each
engine), they’ll resubmit, according to each engine’s acceptable limits.
Yes, tracking spiders is rather complicated, and far more tedious than
submitting. Here are several resources to get you started
STEP 3: Track Your Listings
Site
Build It!'s World Submitter will resubmit automatically if any
Search Engine doesn't index within a reasonable amount of time after a
spider visit or if an engine ever drops you from the index.
SBI!'s ListChecker watches for when each engine lists each of your pages
that have been spidered or indexed. When it finds your URL in the index
of an engine, it reports this date in the Submit-Spider-List Report. |
You’ve been spidered! That means you’re in, right? Not really. It just
means that that engine knows about you. Now you have to watch for when
each engine lists each of your pages (that have been spidered). The pros
call this being indexed. They track each engine to see when their pages
get indexed (the pages are officially in the database, but not yet ranked).
For example, at AltaVista, enter your URL (host:yourdomain.com) into
the search box. It will show you every page from that domain that it has
indexed. Yes, there is a way to check this at each engine. Unfortunately,
every engine has a different protocol. For more info on how to track which
pages have been indexed at each engine
CheckURL
STEP 4: Track Your Rankings
Great! You’re indexed. That means people are finding you, right? Geez,
I hate to be a party-pooper, but no. Once you’re indexed, there’s a lag
before your pages actually show up in search results. And even then, some
of your pages will score better than others. So now what do the professionals
do? They track their ranking for all their keywords, at each engine. There
are several ways to track how your pages rank. Here’s a nice resource,
organized to help you do it manually.
http://www.mike-levin.com/
Even so, tracking your rankings manually takes time, too much time.
To make things worse, as you’ll see in chapter 8, you have to do it over
and over again, each time you make a change to a Web page, re-submit,
spider, index, rank, for each page, for each engine.
Luckily there are services or software that will do it for you. Here’s
the best of a not-quite-perfect bunch (I’ve left out several abysmal services)
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Position Agent
(part of Submit It!)
At $49 per month, it’s pricey
Take the free trial at the bottom of the page. You’ll see that not
all the engines are covered. And, if you check, the results are not correct
for all the engines.
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Top-10
don’t be put off by the long form that you must fill out to get the
free report. It’s a good report, mostly accurate (only missed one engine
by a few spots), and is almost complete (only missing Google)
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AgentWebRanking
Suite
as opposed to the above two, this is client-side software (i.e., it
runs on your computer instead of on the Internet). It’s free. And many
people speak well of it. Download and try it for yourself
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WebPositionGold
probably the Cadillac for ranking. Also client-side software. But it’s
expensive, and very complicated to use. This kind of tool is best in the
hands of consultants who want to build traffic for businesses.
Site
Build It! has some awesome reporting tools. After a page has been
submitted, spidered and indexed, SBI! will start to report on how that
page ranks for its keyword.
The Keyword Ranking Report will tell you how each page ranks during
a search for its Specific Keyword. If the ranking is beyond the top 30
for many of the engines, you can click on the "Analyze It!" button. This
function will give you suggestions on how to optimize your page.
The Keyword Searches Report will tell you which keywords people are
using to find you, will show you how many times you were found with each
of these keywords, and will provide a direct search-link so that you can
see how you rank at a particular engine for a particular keyword.
Yes, it's a quagmire. Tracking how all your pages rank is definitely
tedious stuff. |
So why do all the pros do it? Because it’s so important to know where you
stand. Every situation is different. You have to get the lay of the land,
your land, and see where you stand in it. For example, you might be writing
about succulent plants, there is an entire world of related Web sites,
directory listings, links flying around all over the place and this set
of circumstances is different than the one for fashion.
Suppose you wrote two near-identical pages. The only difference is that
you replaced the word “fashion” with “cactus” (you should never create
such search and replace pages, of course, this is an example to make a
point). Your fashion page ranks Page 1, #1 for every Search Engine. Does
that mean that your cactus page will also be Page 1, #1? Nope. Because
the Web world for fashion is totally different from that of the cactus.
The point of tracking how you rank is to get the lay of your land.
Once you see how your pages fit in your particular Web world (and it
likely won’t be great at first), you start tweaking. We’re getting a bit
ahead of ourselves, but, as we’ll see in the next chapter of this discussion,
the key to building traffic through the free, major Search Engines, is
to try different things until you get the feel for what ranks highly for
your particular theme.
That’s why I recommended in chapter 6 to experiment with different numbers
of Specific Keywords, as well as General Keywords and common synonyms in
titles, headlines, etc. If you have many differently constructed pages,
you’ll notice which pages rank high and which don’t. And that gives you
the basis to improve the ones that don’t. It takes some time and effort.
That’s why the major Search Engines are not really free. They do cost you
something, time, after all, is money. The payoff, however, is terrific,
substantial, nearly free (once you work out what succeeds for you), sustained,
and targeted traffic.
So here’s what you’ve done so far. In chapter 6, you built a Theme-Based
Content Site, full of Keyword-Focused Content Pages. As we’ve discussed,
you’ve overdelivered on content for your human visitors. And, for the engines,
you have also varied your formulas to see what works.
Earlier we talked about how important it is to have a feedback loop
from building to tracking. Now that you have feedback from tracking, it’s
time to take traffic-building action, which brings us to
BIG TECHNIQUE #1 The Free Major Search
Engines
This is still the best way to build traffic on the Net, if you know
what you’re doing. And you soon will! |