Improve
your search engine placement
nzwebs.com can do any part of this for you, all, some or none. Just ask.
Search Engines are your friends
Search engines may seem very unfair that they penalise you by giving you a lower ranking for the slightest little mistake. Search engines do not like repeated keywords in meta tags. Search engines do not like automatic submission programmes. Search engines do not like this, search engines will ban you for that. But there is a good reason for all of this and no need to be intimidated.
Search engines frustrate a lot of people who make queries when results that are not relevant to their search comes up. This can be caused by web site submitters who carelessly submit their sites for categories that their web sites shouldn't be in, or use keywords in the meta tags which have only a slight connection to the topic of their site. It is extremely irritating to search for one thing and get irrelevant results, and it reduces customer perception of the engine's reliability. So to maintain their credibility, search engines change their rules regularly to outwit those that try to get higher rankings when they shouldn't.
Improve your search engine rankings by effective search engine submission
Your web site is up and running
and looking fabulous so list it with the search engines. The search
engines are not the be-all-and-end-all of internet marketing, but your
customers could find it very difficult to find you if you are not listed
with the search engines. There are various kinds of search engines,
some more like directories and others that scan the sources of web pages
for keywords. Others judge your relevance to the search inquiry by
the popularity of your web site, which they measure by the number of other
relevant sites that link to you. With this in mind, here are some
instructions for making your site more findable.
1. Choose your keywords.
Work out which words you would use to search for you. Be specific.
Keywords are important for high search engine placements, because when
somebody does a search, they tell the search engine which topic they want
information about based on the keywords they type in. So make a note
of keywords that describe your web page topic.
2. Pay attention to the
percentage of keywords in your copy. This is important because some
search robots scan the page for the keyword and those pages with the highest
percentage of that keyword get the highest rankings. Print out your web
page, read through it and underline the keywords. See where keywords can
replace pronouns or otherwise be used to increase the percentage of keywords
on your page. However, keep it natural and readable. There's
no need to go overboard. And never try anything sneaky like repeating
your keywords in the same colour as your background colour. The search
engines will penalise you for it, or may not list you at all.
3. Create meta tags of keywords. In the source of your web page is something like this <META
NAME="keywords" CONTENT="search engine, submission, keywords, search results,
rankings, web site, nzwebs.com">. You
can find it by going to view on your browser menu and looking under "html
source", or "source", or "document source". Meta-tags like the one
above are scanned by the search robots for quick results. Have as
few specific keywords as you need so that you don't "dilute" them, and
never have words that don't appear on your page as keywords, even if they
are related to the topic of your web site. Otherwise the search-bots
may think you are trying to trick them into being included in the results
of a search which you have no business being included in. Most search
engines actually ignore meta tags nowadays, but it still increases the
proportion of keywords on your web page.
4. Use
keywords in your page title. The page title for this page is "Step-by-step
nzwebs.com Search Engine Submission Instructions". Make it short,
bearing in mind that it will appear in the bookmark or favourite directory.
5. Use
keywords in your description. Your description should be readable,
descriptive and sum up the content of your web page. Also, use as
many keywords as possible without repeating yourself. Here is the
meta-tag for the description of this page:
<META
NAME="description" CONTENT="Improve your search engine rankings by effective
search engine submission. List your web site with the search engines.
Here are instructions for making your site more findable.">
6. Use
your description at the top of your page. Whatever keywords are highest
on your page is more important according to the search engines. So
use your succinct description full of keywords as your first paragraph.
7.
Include keywords in your URL. I'm hoping you are reading this before
you've registered your domain name. Of course this isn't just because
it is another factor in high search results rankings, albeit a minor one,
but also because you can make your web site address easier to remember.
For example, imagine if for this web site we'd registered the domain name
MyFullName.com instead of nzwebs.com. New Zealanders looking
for information and web site services would possibly not have made the
connection between my full name and services dealing with NZ webs.
nzwebs.com is shorter, easier to spell, easier to remember and includes
2 major keywords: NZ and Webs.
Reciprocal Links
An excellent way to improve
the popularity of your site and therefore relevance according to the search
engines and increase your traffic flow is to encourage other web
sites to link back to you. It does everyone a favour if you include
a links page on your site.
* it saves your visitors re-searching
for similar topics of interest
* because of this, visitors are
more likely to bookmark your page
* it benefits you by adding further
information to your site without you having to create it yourself
* it increases the flow of traffic
to the sites you are linking to.
However, you will receive further advantages if you can convince the sites that you are linking to from your web site to link back to you as well. Then not only could you share some of their visitors, but you send a message to engines that you are a popular and relevant site.
From there, you should keep an eye on your statistics which should be able to tell you which sites are referring traffic to you, and which sites people are leaving your site for. If you are sending traffic to other sites but little or none is coming to you in return it could be that their site is not attracting many direct visitors; the reason for that could be that their content is dull or the site is not working properly, or they have not put the link to your site in a good position for their visitors to find. In which case you may consider quietly removing the link from your site, unless their material is screamingly important to your visitors.
What about automatic submission programmes and services?
Some web designers offer automated search engine submission services, which submit your web page to up to a thousand search engines in one go. However, in my opinion, most of these 1,000 search engines are small and unnecessary. Another reason not to use automatic submission programmes is that search engines prefer manual submission. To increase your chances of a high ranking, I recommend you use the links on this page to manually submit your web pages yourself, or ask nzwebs.com to do it for you.
Submitting to search engines
Before you start, you'll need
the following information handy, so open a word document and cut and paste
the following:
* The URL or web site address
of the web page your are submitting
* The page title
* The description
* The keywords
Although not all search engines
will require all of the above, some will require even more information, such as:
* Your contact details
* Your physical location
* Your web page's category, e.g.
travel, sport etc.
Now you are ready to submit
your web page to the search engines. However, don't submit till the
page is up, running and looking perfect. This means no "under construction" pages and no broken links.
It varies in the amount of time it takes for your submission to be integrated in the search engines. Please note, that some search engines offer an express service where you can pay money and get a faster review. This does not guarantee that you will get a higher ranking, or even accepted (if your site is not of good quality).
Go
back
to free stuff page.
Submitting to search engines (cont.)
After all, if you could pay for a higher ranking, that would impact on the ability of the search engine to give relevant and accurate search engine results - the really useful and relevant results could be way down the list at number 84 and the highly placed sites in the results could be full of meaningless hard sell from sites with large advertising budgets, so why would anyone want to use a search engine who gives them that? All it means when you pay the search engine money for their services (if you do, and I don't think you need to) is that they will look at your site more quickly than they would when you submit it to their free service.
If you submit each different page, with different keywords and descriptions, it can multiply your chances of being found. However each page must be genuinely different and must be worth being an 'entry page'.
Here are the main non-NZ based search engines' submission pages (please let me know if any of these links are broken, as sometimes they change them to stymie automatic submission programmes):
Alta
Vista
AOL
Excite
Google
HotBot are currently in the
process of upgrading their service to provide better reliability and performance.
The following search engines or directories provide content to HotBot:
Direct Hit, Inktomi, Open Directory, Overture. The following search
engines receive content from HotBot: None.
Lycos receives their web
results from a variety of sources. The following search engines or
directories provide content to Lycos: Fast Search, Open Directory, Overture.
The following search engines receive content from Lycos: none.
MSN
Open
Directory Project
Yahoo
If you are based in New Zealand
it is worth submitting to the New Zealand search engines as well.
Here are the submission pages of the New Zealand Search Engines:
Anzwers
The
National Library of New Zealand - Te Puna Web Directory
Search
NZ
NZSearch
Julianne of nzwebs.com
This is for their Basic
Submit service, which allows you to suggest up to five pages to be added
to or removed from the AltaVista global database. They generally evaluate
your suggestions within four to six weeks.
The following search engines
or directories provide content to AltaVista: Looksmart, Overture.
The following search engines receive content from AltaVista: None.
The following search engines
or directories provide content to AOL: Google, so if you want to be listed
in AOL, submit to Google. Clicking on the above link will take you
to the Google Submission page. The following search engines receive
content from AOL: None
Excite results come from
Pay-Per-Click engines, notably Overture for top results followed by Inktomi.
Adding a URL and ranking management is achieved through Overture and Inktomi.
Excite, WebCrawler, and Magellan all use the same database in conducting
their searches; therefore, these search engines return the same results.
The following search engines or directories provide content to Excite:
Overture, Inktomi, Fast, AskJeeves, Looksmart. The following search
engines receive content from Excite: Magellan, WebCrawler.
Only the top-level page
from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page.
Their crawler, Googlebot, will be able to find the rest. Google updates
its index on a regular basis, so updated or outdated link submissions are
not necessary. Dead links will 'fade out' of their index on their next
crawl when they update their entire index. Google is also included in the
Open Directory Project. The following search engines or directories
provide content to Google: Open Directory. The following search engines
receive content from Google: Netscape, Yahoo, AOL Sponsored Listings
MSN uses LookSmart as do
Excite and WebCrawler. But non-profit and for profit sites may be
submitted at no charge for inclusion in the Web Pages section of the MSN
Search. Sites in the Web Pages section will be ranked below sites that
are submitted via the Express Submit service and will not be included in
the MSN Directory. There is no guarantee of acceptance or turnaround time
for these submissions, and they will not appear in any other area of MSN
Search. As well as that, you may find you have an error after submitting
your url for inclusion so you can't be sure it's been received. The
following search engines or directories provide content to MSN: Direct
Hit, Looksmart, Inktomi, Overture. The following search engines receive
content from MSN: None.
Once your site has been
accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to
several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the
Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos,
Netscape Search, etc. They make updates of the data available weekly, but
each partner has their own update schedule.
The following search engines
or directories provide content to The Open Directory: None. The following
search engines receive content from The Open Directory (sites using ODP
data): AllTheWeb, Google, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape.
Most non-commercial sites
have been suggested to Yahoo! the standard way, rather than their express
submit service. Due to the volume of suggestions, they cannot guarantee
a timely consideration of your site. (Their express submit service
which costs US$199.00 and takes 7 days.) They spend time at each
site they visit to determine if it should be included in the directory.
This is a time-consuming process. They receive thousands of suggestions
every day and do their best to review as many of them as possible.
The following search engines or directories provide content to Yahoo: Google.
The following search engines receive content from Yahoo: None.
The add your Web Site to
the ANZWERS database service is no longer available. ANZWERS is powered
by Google and if you'd like your site listed submission is available at
the above ANZWERS link.
Internet information resources
will be included in the directory if they are: within the domain name range
of the country, hosted overseas and contain information about that country
and meets the other selection criteria, commercial sites that provide financial
and organisational information on the company, commercial sites that provide
information of public interest (e.g. transport timetables), Electronic
journals sites that provide at a minimum content page information, Pacific
Island tourist sites that provide a significant amount of information on
the country or when there are no other web sites providing information
country. The directory will not include: commercial sites that only
contain advertising or contact information, sexually explicit commercial
internet resources, except where they meet other selection criteria (e.g.
provide financial and organisational information), sites promoting illegal
acts (e.g. bomb making, paedophilia etc.), personal home pages, except
where they contribute to the documentary record of the New Zealand experience.
To prevent the engine being
spammed by automatic submission programmes the editor of Search NZ told
me that they frequently change their page from which you add URLs.
In this case it's best to go to their opening page and click on the link
for adding your site. (Don't use the side menu links which weren't
working when I checked them - use the text links under the search button).
You should submit a URL of a New Zealand web site. The URL should be a
proper domain name and not an IP address. The site will be checked and
then submitted for inclusion in batches. They will attempt to notify you
if your site is unable to be contacted.
According to NZSearch, as
they have added various new features not currently available in most Web
Directories, it may take a little longer to submit your site. They assure
you that your site's added exposure with NZSearch will make this process
worthwhile!
CONTACT
ME
Em: j@nzwebs.com
Tel: +64 3 331 7022
Mobile: 02 747 66 33 4
PO Box 30-048,
St Martins 8246,
Christchurch,
New Zealand.