How to Getting Listed in Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
The first step is to get listed in your favorite search engines. There are three ways to do this:
Submit your Web address directly to the search engine for free.
Get someone already listed to link to your site.
Pay to have your site listed on one or more search engines.
Which you do depends entirely on the search engine you're targeting. Obviously, the free option appeals to most people. To submit a site to Google, fill out the simple form at www.google.com/addurl. To submit a site to Yahoo!, go to submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request you'll need to register for a Yahoo! account if you don't already have one. To submit to MSN Search, use the form at search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx . Submitting your site to the major search engines only takes a few minutes and is well worth the effort.
More Site Submissions
For the URL submission forms and guidelines for other sites, see the list of links at www.memwg.com/free-site-submit.
Downsides of Free Site Submission
Don't expect your site to show up immediately in the search engine's listings. It may take weeks before the search engine crawls (that is, inventories the pages of) your site. Or it may refuse your site for various reasons.
Not all search engines let you submit sites for free. Some require either a one-time payment or a subscription in order to list your site. There may be different payment levels available, with the pricier levels guaranteeing more prominent placement of your site in the search engine's results. Some sites, like Yahoo! and MSN, offer both free and paid submission options.
No Paid Submissions for Google
Google does not offer the option to pay to have your site listed in its index. All site submissions are free of charge. Site owners cannot pay to increase their page rankings: Google has always said that sponsored results (AdWords) do not affect how they rank pages relative to one another.
Is it worth paying for getting listed? Not initially. Submit your site to the search engines using their free submission forms as soon as you have a few good pages of content available, and spend your time (and money) working on other aspects of the site. Wait until the site's been running for a while and you've explored other avenues for increasing traffic.
The other way to be listed by a search engine is to get an already indexed site to link to yours. Search engines periodically recrawl the sites in their indexes, looking for new content and new links. If one of these sites links to a page on your site, the crawler will eventually find its way to that page. And if you've followed the linking rules laid out in Chapter 5, the search engine will then be able to find your site's home page and site map, and soon all your pages will find their way into the index.
The trick, of course, is to get a link to your site on someone else's site. If you know someone who already has an indexed site up and running, you can simply ask that person to link to your site. Getting your site mentioned in someone's blog is an easy way to do it if your site has useful information that the blogger thinks would be of interest to his or her readers. Note that the quality of the links to your site is also importantmore on this shortly.
Getting listed in a Web directorylike the original Yahoo! directory or the Google directory is another way to get into search engine indexes. (A directory is something like a phone book for Web sites.) For submissions to the Yahoo! directory, see the links near the bottom of the http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html page. The Google directory is actually based on the directory maintained by the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ or ODP, a Web-community effort. Getting listed is free, but it's a more involved (and sometimes controversial) processsee http://dmoz.org/add.html for more details.
Free Listing for Your Site
Purchasers of this book can apply to get their site listed for free on the www.memwg.com Web site if the site was built with the help of this book. See the full list of conditions at www.memwg.com/free-listing.
