Promoting your Web Site on the Search Engines and Directories

When you are in Business, regardless of what type of business, you certainly want to have a website and begin marketing it on the internet. After you have built your website, the next step is to ensure it is properly "optimized". That simply means that it's body text(the text that you see), title and meta tags(the text that you don't see) all have the keywords you are trying to target on the Search results. While these search engines are quite important for your site, you should not rely entirely on Search Engines and Directories for traffic to your website. You will probably at some point wish to try other tools like opt-in lists, an e-newsletter you publish and send out, free-for-all pages, newsgroups, message boards, and so on.

The first lesson about search engine submissions is to simply do it by yourself. This will also save you much needed capital that can be better spent elsewhere. Even though here are a plethora of automated submission services out there, it is recommended that you submit your website to at least the primary Search Engines manually. This is due to the fact that the primary search engines are so vital, and some of them automatically reject any submission made from a program. Furthermore, each search engine has different allowable numbers of keywords and they vary on how many characters your site description can be. They also want different kinds of personal information (although in some refreshing cases they only want your url). Submission software, even if it was universally accepted, is usually not flexible enough to cover all these bases. In addition, manually submitting your website is so easy that any amateur can do it, and I mean anyone who has the most basic skills on a computer. You basically just go to the Search engine you want to submit to and click the "add url" button. Then insert the self explanatory information. Actually a few are a tad more complicated than that, but most are really that easy. That is what some people are paying people big bucks to do, except those individuals are often using mass submission software which is generally ineffective.

Some Search Engine spiders or crawlers will ultimately find your site if you submit your web address to them or not. They will find your site by following links from other websites. For this reason you should consider setting up some reciprocal links to other similar but non-competing websites. Doing this will also give you website a higher ranking on some of the major search engines. This is due to the fact that certain major search engines, such as Google and MSN, rate your website partially on it's "link popularity" with other websites. This is also a free way to help your site receive more hits and being a Home Business entrepreneur without wheel barrels full of venture capital you will need all the free methods you can get. Ironically, these free methods are often more effective than more expensive strategies and do not necessarily take up much more time.

Although meta tags are not as crucial to your site as they previously were, they are still of some value. Concentrate mainly on the title and description tags and make sure the keywords you want to come up high for are there. To find out if your meta tags are optimized, go to scrub the web dot com as they have a free meta tag checking service. They will automatically spider your website and give you suggestions on how many keywords each of your tags should have, etc. Some search engines, such Inktomi still give a relatively high relevance to these tags. The main Search engines and Directories you should focus on for yours site include Google (which is currently the most popular), Yahoo (you need to pick a category to submit your site if you are submitting to the directory side. Some categories are free to submit to and others are not), Search.msn.com, Inktom i(used in several search engines. Pay for inclusion or you can wait until the spider finds your site for free), ODP or the Open Directory Project (critical to be listed here, go to dmoz.org), Looksmart (free and paid listings) and Lycos.com.

For more information go to Home Business News and find out more about search engine submissions in the business article archive.