Submitting Your Website to the Search Engines for Free!
At this point, you should have your website fully optimized for the search engines, a list of good keywords, and Google Analytics set up. If you don't have these items completed yet, I suggest that you go back and take care of those items first. You'll need the information that you've generated from the previous steps in this process and although you don't need to have Google Analytics set up to submit to the search engines, it's fun to actually see the results.
There are a lot of search engines and directories on the Web. Some of them are very specialized, some cost money, and some of them have to be manually reviewed for inclusion. In this section, I'll show you how to submit to the free search engines with the desktop application Web CEO, and how to submit your site to DMOZ.
Submitting to the Free Search Engines
- Download Web CEO from Download.com
- Install it.
- Launch it and either create a new account or log in with your existing one.
- Click on 'Add New Site' and enter in your URL and a nickname for your site. Follow the next couple of screens until you have it created.
- Click on 'Submit URLs' from the QuickLaunch screen.
- Select the site that you just created in #4 from the list and click on OK.
- Enter in all the information under the Setup tab. Make sure to enter in all the information under the 'Page details' sub tab too. If you click on the 'Populate from Home page' button, Web CEO will grab the title, description, and keywords from your site! After you have this information all entered in, click on 'Save'. If you have any errors, Web CEO will let you know.
- Click on the 'Auto submission' tab at the top.
- Click on the 'List of engines' button in the bottom left.
- Check all the search engines you'd like to automatically submit to. I usually check on all the search engines in the USA (sometimes all the English ones too). Click OK when you're done.
- Click on the Submission sub-tab.
- Click on the Submit button at the bottom. Your URL will start being submitted to the search engines that you selected. It will take a while and you'll see status updates on whether the submissions were successful or not.
- You'll probably have a few submissions that failed. These could be caused by problems with their sites. Click on 'Resubmit Erroneous' to retry these. Doing this will often pick up a few more successful submissions.
Submitting to DMOZ
What is DMOZ?
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. (From www.wikipedia.com)
Why DMOZ?
Getting listed on DMOZ greatly helps out site's rank in Google. Since each site is human-reviewed, any site in DMOZ is considered a legitimate site that adds value.
How To Get Listed
- Go to www.dmoz.org/add.html and read through all the submission guidelines.
- Do a search on the dmoz.org site for what your site is about OR drill down through the categories to find the category/subcategory that best fits what your website is all about.
- Click on the 'suggest URL' link at the top. (If you don't see it, you need to choose a more specific category)
- Fill out the form. Pay special attention to the title & description fields. Use the same techniques that you used for your site title & description, which you should have loaded with impactful keywords/phrases. However, you'll need to keep in mind that the Open Directory Project is run by human editors and they will change your title & description as needed-you are basically 'suggesting' a good title & description that appropriately describes your site.
- Now wait. It could take weeks to be reviewed and there's no guarantee that your site will make it.