How to publish your site the right way

So how do I submit my website to the search engines? Consideration needs to be given to where and how you publish/submit your website. By the where I mean, search engines, web directories etc. It’s a very satisfying feeling when you’ve finished creating a website. You have done all your research, have some good content and now are ready to start publishing your website to the World Wide Web.

Well, you may or may not know this, but the easy part is over. Yes, anyone can build a website. Whether it’s good looking or not is irrelevant.

A great looking website with impressive graphics can rank miserably in the search engines whereas another not so great looking, plain html site, with little or no graphics may rank very well. Knowing what to submit is extremely important because this can impact your rankings.

To get to the point, when you have just created a web page don’t go running to websites that offer to submit your site to hundreds of thousands of search engines. They’ll no doubt want you to pay for this service and your results if any will not be worth it. It may even penalize your rankings because you have no control over who links to you.

As in the real world, you are judged by the quality of the company you keep. You can’t control who links to you but you can minimize bad in-links. High quality in-bound links are what you want. Build and develop those. They are harder to get and take it should be viewed as a long term goal but its rewards are well worth the effort.

In reality there are only a few reputable search engines out there. In some instances you may even loose points for directly submitting your site to Google. It is better for the Google bots to find your site through other reputable directories such as the ODP (Open Directory Project) or DMOZ.ORG and Yahoo’s directories. (This is just my opinion however)

The ODP is a very good directory for you to be listed in. It’s the largest human edited directory on the web. It has millions of listings, but is not a search engine. Its editors are made up a very large community of volunteer editors. You should submit to the Yahoo directory also as well as other specialist reputable directories. It takes a while longer since they are edited by humans. You also have no guarantee that they will even include your site in their listings. So make sure that your site is complete and that all the links work.

Links to a lot of outside sites for purely earning affiliate commissions are not advised. If you must have links to affiliates your site needs to have valuable content of its own. Link farms as they are sometimes referred to are web pages that just have links to outside sites or Google ads with no substance or content of their own. Avoid doing this if you want good rankings.

Google and Yahoo both see listings coming from credible sites that have been around a long time as valuable.

Search engines are concerned and rightly so, in getting their users relevant content. This is why before submitting your site to the search engines, you need to ensure that your site validates. Validation is simply checking to see whether your html code is valid. The W3C determines web standards. (W3C stands for: World Wide Web Consortium) and if your code validates there you’ll know that the search engine spiders will be able to read your entire site and all its content without omitting pages due to the spider encountering those errors in your code.

There are links on the home pages of the major search engines, like Yahoo, Google, MSN, AltaVista, AOL and so forth. One thing to note however is that some of these search engines power other engines’ main results. So when I go to submit my site to Yahoo I am essentially submitting it to AltaVista for example. You can check this by simply going to AltaVista and trying to submit your site. They will direct you to Yahoo. So too for the search engine, AllTheWeb, and MSN Search. They all receive their main results from Yahoo.

Once you’ve submitted your site to the various search engines and want to improve your ranking, don’t use automated query software. Google also advises against using services such as WebPosition Gold, because they send automated queries to Google that absorb their resources.

So to summarize:

Validate your code.
Don’t overcrowd your web pages with keywords.
Make sure you have relevant high quality content.
Don’t use hidden text to try and fool the search engine spiders. You will not do your ranking any good.
Submit your site to the major search engines and be patient.

Lastly, you can check if Google’s’ robots have indexed your site by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters and checking to see if your site actually has been crawled by the spiders. Choose the webmaster tools to get detailed information about this. You may need to sign up for an account to get the advanced features.

By Roger Samboer

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