"Free" Search Engines

The Magnificent 7

The majority of the well-known Search Engines (SEs) - AltaVista, Lycos, etc - don't charge to have your site listed. At least not yet, though there are some signs that things are changing. Until or unless this happens, these are an important potential source of free traffic, so you should ensure your site is listed on all the main SEs.

I strongly recommend you do this by hand, as there are only a few sites that will deliver large amounts of traffic - and they are too important to leave to automated services.

At time of writing, these are the URLs for what I call the "Magnificient 7" - the SEs that deliver the most traffic:

AltaVista

http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl

Excite

http://www.excite.com/info/add_url

Google

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

HotBot

http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp

Go/InfoSeek

http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html

Northern Light

http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html

All these SEs tell you to only submit one page from your site as they use spiders which crawl through your site, following links and indexing your other pages. Well, they might, but they're not very reliable, so I add one page from each of my domains to each of these SEs each day.

The Best of the Rest

What about the other 25 Million SEs (or whatever the latest number is) ? Firstly, most of these are Free For All (FFA) link pages that have ben set up just to trap email addresses.

But that still leaves several hundred/thousand minor SEs that can deliver traffic but are too time-consuming to submit to manually. There are a number of free submission services around, that will get you started. Bear in mind though that current best practice suggests you should be submitting most if not all the individual pages of your site, and you should be doing it again every few weeks - so this can become a time consuming task if they don't let you store your information between sessions.

A better idea would be to start with the trial versions of software like Submission Wizard or Submit Wolf and then upgrade to the paid version when you are ready.

These packages are installed on your PC and set up to store the details of each submission and allow you to easily re-submit them again and again. Software like this also allows you to select all or specific search engines and directories to submit to - and produces reports following each submission run. Critically - with potentially hundreds of sites to submit to on a regular basis, Submit Wolf runs up to 20 sessions in parallel to make the most of your on-line time.

SE submission is also one of the many marketing modules contained within ROIBot

So, I suggest you remove the "Magnificent 7" from the automated lists (so you don't duplicate your manual work), and use the software to submit to the other SEs.

Optimization

Of course it isn't enough just to get listed in an SE - you really want to be at or near the top of the kind of searches your customer is going to do.

There is a vast amount of information available on optimizing your site so the search engines will "love" it, but a few things are clear:

• The rules the SEs use to rank sites are secret.
• They change all the time.
• Most searches produce many irrelevant sites.

Introduction Pages

The most widely accepted current strategy for improving your search engine positioning involves producing "intro" pages, each of which concentrates on a word or phrase you expect to be searched on.

For example, if your site generally is targeted at owners of classic cars, you might consider setting up a page that focuses on classic Fords, and one on classic Chevrolets, etc etc.

If you believe (or better - know) that your target audience are going to search for "classic Ford" then you would consider setting up a page with that phrase appearing:

• In the title.
• In the headline.
• In "meta" tags
• In other key elements such as headings and links.
• Throughout the text of the page (especially near the beginning).

If you have content specific to "classic Ford" then great - include it on that page (even if it duplicates content elsewhere on the site). If not, use this page to point to elements of your site that are relevant to anyone searching for "classic Ford":

• Click here to search for books on Classic Fords.
• Want to chat about Classic Fords - click on over to our discussion board.
• Fill in this form to get all the latest info on Classic Fords from this site.

This format can be duplicated for other similar searches you think (or know) your target audience might make.

NB - this technique only works where you can create intro pages that are in themselves useful and contain - or point to - useful and relevant content. SEs that have a human editorial element to their approval will frown upon "intro" pages if they look like "gateways" - a technique that generates lots and lots of almost identical pages with only the target key word or phrase changed.

Although it is efficient to duplicate an intro format for different words, it is also worth taking some time to make each intro page different. There are rumors of new processes being developed for the SEs that will result in all duplicate content being compressed down and ignored - a response to the abuse of "gateway" pages.

Submit and Wait

Bear in mind that it can take anything from days to weeks for your site to appear at all - let alone in a great position. See the section on Pay Per Click SEs to get things moving more quickly.

Wait and Submit

Some SEs will penalize you if you keep sending them the same information over and over again. The only way to be sure about how often you can submit - and if there are any specific rules like how many pages per site per day - is to check with each SE. Tools such as Submit Wolf track things like date of last submission to help you avoid being blacklisted.