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Search engine ranking is very important. There are various methods of getting better results. First, you must prepare your site for submission to the search engines. Here are a few tips for site preparation:
- Make sure you use meta tags. For more information on meta tags, go to our Meta tags explained page. The more meta tags you use, the more information search engines have on your page. Most important are the CONTENT and KEYWORDS tags. Expiration dates are also frequently used.
- Use descriptive titles. Instead of "My Home Page" or "Buy things here," use as descriptive a title as possible. Do not put keywords or "spam" in your title just to increase your search ranking. Many directories (such as Yahoo) and search engines (such as AltaVista) will specifically exclude your site if you use such techniques.
- See if you can "optimize" your site - do what you can to decrease load time. Also, make sure you don't have redundant or unnecessary tables.
Before submitting it, a difference must be explained. There are really two main categories of "search engines."
Directories
Yahoo is an example of a directory. Employees at Yahoo review all the submitted web sites and place them in categories. When a search is performed at yahoo, you are only searching the categorized sites within the Yahoo directory.
Spiders/Crawlers
These types of search engines actually search. You submit your site, and a proprietary computer system "crawls" through your site, mapping each page and entering the page into its database. It then follows links from each page to other pages which the program enters into the database. In order to get your site listed on a true search engine (a spider/crawler), submit the URL of the main page and computers do the work. This is the difference from a directory, where humans do the work.
Site submission is an often tedious and time-consuming process -- not just on the site owner's end, but also on the search engine's end. If you do submit your site, it may not appear for days, weeks, or even months (or never if you are submitting to Yahoo's incredibly fickle staff).
More information will always be available at the home page of the search engine. This information often changes, so it's best to get it straight from the source. Here are links to some top search sites:
Other links involving web site submission:
- Guide to search engines and submitting
- Covers various methods of preparing your site for engine submission
- EuroSubmit - automatically submits your site to top search engines
- Free site submission to the top ten search engines