SITE SUBMISSION

Made Easy

ONCE YOU HAVE a website, you need people to find it. Most of your visitors will probably come to your site through links on the web. It's your responsibility to generate those links. What's a good way to go about it, and to keep track of the links once they exist?

Search Engines

Probably the first thing that comes to mind is: Search Engines -- getting them to index your site! You may have seen ads for software or online services that automatically submit your website to hundreds (or even thousands!) of search engines, in the blink of an eye. It's widely believed, however, that such automatic submissions are worthless at best; and, at worst, that they may even get you black-listed by search engines.

Don't concern yourself with these schemes; the fact is, there's minuscule benefit in submitting to so many search engines anyway. The vast majority of all web searches (between 80% and 98%, depending on whose research we choose to believe) involve no more than 10 search engines; all the rest are grappling, tooth and nail, for the leftovers.

You can easily submit your site to the top 10 search engines, and even a few more; here's a page that ranks the top 50, with a link to each (and here's a different version of the top 50 :^). However, it's easier and MUCH FASTER to get your site listed by the top search engines merely by getting a link on a page already listed by them!

(The one search engine I routinely submit sites to is www.exactseek.com, because they list sites very quickly, and because I can request a visit by their spider at any time -- for example, just after adding or updating pages on a site.)

Open Directory Project

Regardless of the subject matter of your website, there are almost surely appropriate directory sites that will give you a link (you can find them by typing your subject + the word directories, in the major search engines).

The paramount directory site of all is the Open Directory Project (ODP), www.dmoz.org. It's been around a long time; its listings are garnered by actual human beings, not by web-spiders; and, because of this human evaluation, a site listed by ODP is sure to be indexed (and likely with some degree of preference) by the major search engines.

The fly-in-the-ointment at ODP is this: the listings are gathered and evaluated by volunteers, hence there are many categories without editors. If your site happens to fall in one of those categories -- Good luck to you!! Your submission may sit, unread, for years (I'm not exaggerating)....

If the category immediately above yours has an editor (the answer is yes, if there's a link to him or her at the bottom of the page), you can contact that person, explain your plight, and possibly get your submission reviewed by him or her. (If that category also has no editor, go up to the next level, etc.)

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Google Alerts!

IF YOU MANAGE to get listed in ODP, it's a sure bet that all the worthwhile search engines will find you. Likewise, there are countless directory sites that import their listings directly from ODP. So, before long, links to your site will be popping up in lots of places.

In case you'd like to know about them, Google has an automated service that will notify you (by email) every time it finds a new link. You can initiate this service by going to www.google.com/alerts (put the URL of the web page (for example, http://yoursite.com/), exactly as listed by ODP, in the field that says "Search terms:", and choose "Web" in the field that says "Type").

Keeping Track

In addition to this growing number of directory sites that will be linking, you may find many relevant sites from which to request reciprocal links. You may also get links by having articles published on other sites, or buying advertising on sites.

It's a very good idea to keep track of all these links. You may decide, at some point, to change the name of your site, or its description, or even the URL of your link -- at which time you'll want to notify everyone linking to you.

Even if you make no changes, the ongoing process of requesting links can be quite bothersome and time-consuming unless you approach it systematically. The following approach has worked very well for me:

I make an HTML page for each website (or section of a website) I'm promoting. At the top of the page, I put the following:

• the URL I'm submitting as a link (for example, http://mysite.com/);
• the text of the link (for example, My Website);
• a brief description (or maybe 2 or 3, from which to choose) of the site;
• my email address.

These are the elements usually needed when making submissions. By having them all in one place, I can easily copy-and-paste them (either into forms on websites, or into emails) -- and the quickest, easiest way I've found to copy them is to put each one in a text field (using <textarea> tags in the HTML. That way, the whole element can be copied simply by clicking into the text field, pressing "Ctrl" + "A", then "Ctrl" + "C".

Under these text fields, I then list all the known pages with links to me, and pages where I've submitted the site. On my HTML page, I make each of these URLs a link -- one that will open in a new window -- then I can easily check each of them, just by clicking the link, to see how my link is displayed on their page (and to be sure it is displayed). I can also note any relevant info regarding each page.

This list of pages can be sub-divided into categories; for example: Search Engines, Directories, Reciprocal Links, Non-Reciprocal Links, Articles, XML Feeds, and Ads. Then, at the bottom of the page, I put a JavaScript gizmo that counts words, and one that counts characters (because sometimes website descriptions are limited to a certain number of words or characters).