Just like a traditional business when you open your doors you have to let someone know you exist. It is the same way when you put your business or personal website online for the first time. You have to let the search engines know about it by submitting the uniform resource locator (URL) to the search engine submission area which requests it to be added to their index. This submission process also includes submitting your page to the numerous directories so that you can get back links to your web site and rank higher with Google. Let’s look at some ways to submit your page to search engines and directories:
Start with the most popular websites. You will first want to make a list and order it by the significance of the search engine. For example, Google and Yahoo would probably be at the top of your list because they are the largest and span the greatest web presence.
Submitting your web page to Google is easy. Just go to Google.com/addurl. You only need to supply the URL to the top level page. The Googlebot will take that top level page and branch out from there discovering the remaining pages.
Ask.com supports the Sitemap protocol. Sitemap protocol is described at sitemap.org. A site map using the Sitemap protocol is an extended markup language (XML) file with a specific structure describing all of the pages associated with a particular web site. It is a way to enhance discovery of all the web pages by the search engine crawler.
Yahoo has several paths. Go to search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html and you have choices for letting Yahoo know of your web site, a mobile web site, or media content. You can also submit products and travel promotions. This model is more designed to fit to Yahoo’s portal-style search engine.
Letting Live.com know of your pages is easy too. You can tell the search engine the location of your web page at search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx. It is like Google in that you only have to enter the URL of the top-level web page and the Live bots will find and index the rest.
Don’t use automated methods. Most of these sites where you enter your URL have graphical letters that must be entered as shown so as to ward of those who would try to automate the process.
What a pain this task can be. You not only need to give your web page URL to the major search engines. You need to submit it to the other directories for one-way links too. And there are literally hundreds of these directories. What typically happens is the submitter loses track of where he or she last submitted the URL for the site getting promoted and ends up doing double submissions. This is where a free online service like onewaytextlink.com comes in handy. Registration is free and it lists all the websites that will allow you to submit your article containing a link back to your web page or just the URL to it.
Don’t forget about DMOZ.org. The Open Directory Project or DMOZ.org has been around for many years and it is still the number one free web directory and the most important one for you to submit your web page to. Listing after submission on this directory is not automatic. Your web page has to be reviewed by human editors.
Tags: add page, add url, search engine
