Free Web Authoring Resources - Submitting Your Site to Search Engines and Indexes

Promotion

Search Engine Submission

Having a web site is rather pointless unless people can find it. To do that, they use search engines or indexes. To get listed by them, you have three choices:

Go to each engine and index, find their "Add a URL" page, and fill out their form. That's one form per engine or index, most of which want you to enter your site's title, description, and keywords, pick a category for your site, and get your name, address, and email address.
Use an online sumbission service. Fill out one form, then just click on SUBMIT buttons.
Use software you can evaluate or purchase for your PC. This makes it easy to submit multiple pages to the engines and indexes. The software is kept more up to date than the online services, and submits to many more sites. You usually have the opportunity to optimize your submission for each engine and index.

In my opinion, the first option is far too labor-intensive. Number three is great for commercial sites that can justify the cost of the software. That leaves option two for most of us.

If you use more than one of these web sites or software packages, be very careful that you don't submit any of your pages to the same engine or index more than once. Some will automatically delete sites that are submitted multiple times within a given period of time.

By the way, my personal opinion is that "Free for All" sites are useless as a promotion tool and mostly cause you to get lots of junk email.

I've gone through dozens of search engine submission sites. I've only included the best ones here (even though I could get commissions from many of the fee-based submission services). The "Best of the Best" is SelfPromotion.com. It is so good that I've begun to review and delete many others that I've had listed on this page for a long time.

Be sure you've optimized your site for the search engines as described on the Preparation page before using any of these services.

Before using any submission service, be sure to sign up for webmaster accounts at the major search engines. That will give you access to tools for submitting your site to them using site maps and managing your listings, including validating which pages are in the index and viewing any errors that their spiders had in trying to index your site. Here is where to go:

Google Webmaster
Live Search Webmaster
Yahoo! Site Explorer

I think this is the best free/cheap submission site out there, and is what I use for my sites. It requires the least typing needed to exactly meet the submission requirements for the supported engines and indexes. Every search engine and index has their own requirements for how many characters or words should be in your description, keywords, and title.

You decide which engines and indexes you want to register with, and this site generates a custom form that asks for exactly the information needed to register with those sites. It then validates your input and tells you specifically what you need to change to optimize your fields for a specific site. It then saves your optimized content for that field (such as "Site Description") for use at the next site with the same requirements.

The end result is about a half dozen versions of your site description, each a different number of words or characters, all saved in SelfPromotion.com's database. If you didn't go through this minor amount of extra effort, your page would either not be accepted by a site, be ranked low, or would show a truncated description in the site's results page.

It saves all the information you entered (four weeks for free, forever if you make an annual donation of $10 or more). When you return to promote to more sites or to promote other pages, it can fill out most of the form for you. This saves you a huge amount of time and effort.

You can use SelfPromotion.com for free to register your site with all the important search engines and indexes, and THEN decide if and how much you want to pay to support the service. Unlike other free trial deals you'll come across, this one is not limited to a small number of search engines or otherwise crippled. The minimum donation to get special priviledges (access to extra tools, the ability to submit to award sites, and retention of your data for a year) is only $10!

Easy Submit

You provide the usual information and it takes you through a page for each engine where you enter information specific to that engine, if any, and then click the right button to submit your page. Basically, it provides a framed page with the actual engine submission page as one of the frames, with all of the common information already filled in. A good compromise between optimizing for each engine and letting you submit with one click.

However, it truncates your page title at 60 characters and your keywords at 150 characters, even if the site you are submitting to supports more characters.

Exploit Submission Wizard Software for Windows

This is software you download and install on your PC. It is limited in features unless you pay for and register the software. However, the functionality in the free version makes it worthwhile.

If you have a child-friendly site, you might want to submit it to this search site.

Books about Web Site Promotion