Bogus Site-Promotion Services

Submitting your site to the major search engines is of critical importance, and there is a bit of an art to getting good rankings. In fact, several newsletters are devoted to the ever-changing policies of the searchies. Search Engine Watch is a good one. As with most things however, doing your submissions properly requires an investment of time, so there are ten million cats out there offering to do it for you for a fee. Some are good, some are incompetent, and some are simply scamsters.

"We'll submit your site to 500 search engines for $19.95!" Why is that a bad deal? For starters, there aren't 500, or even 200, sites that are worth submitting to. The top half-dozen search sites get 95% of the hits, and most of the so-called search engines out there get zilch. Many of them are themselves a poor attempt at a scam of one sort or other (see below). Smaller specialty directories are another story. Some of them are well worth submitting to, if you have a site that fits into their category. But the search-engine sharpies are hardly going to take the time to seek out such directories for $19.95.

In fact, all they're going to do is to plug your URL into an automated program that submits to all the search engines with the click of a mouse. However, search engine submissions do not always "take" on the first attempt, and some engines deliberately exclude "automated" submissions. So your $19.95 is gone, and your site may have only gotten into 3 or 4 worthwhile directories, something you could have accomplished yourself in about 15 minutes.

There are several programs that allow you to submit search engine listings automatically, but the most reputable one is Submit-It. It works, it saves time, and the search engines grudgingly accept it. Personally, I still prefer to go to each engine individually and craft my submissions to get the most out of each one.

Some submission services, of course, are not bad. In fact, yours truly the author offers Internet marketing consulting services, including search engine submissions. Like any good contractor, a good submitter will work with the client to learn their needs, and make a bid (which will unfortunately be a lot more than $19.95).

Whether you hire someone to submit your site, or do it yourself, here are the steps that need to be taken:

1. Good marketing begins with site design. Keywords should appear often in body text, headings, page titles and even filenames. Don't go overboard - keep headings and titles readable and sensible. Pages should also include META tags, with page description and keywords.
2. There are probably some pages that you don't want spiders to find (templates, experimental sections, etc). Include a file called robots.txt in your root directory with a list of directories that shouldn't be indexed. It's annoying to go to a search engine and find out that a bunch of out-of-context pages from four levels down show up, but your home page doesn't.
3. Never submit your site until it's ready for visitors. "Under-construction" signs are lame.
4. Once the site has been thoroughly tested and proofread, submit to the top 50 or so general search engines and directories. An excellent list of the top 100 is provided by the Multimedia Marketing Group.
5. Next, seek out specialty directories that fit the site's subject matter, for example Virtual Travel Search Engines for travel sites, or devSEARCH or The Virtual Library of WWW Development for Web development resources. A list of specialty directories can be seen at Super Seek. There are plenty of international directories out there, so if a site features a language other than English, or even serves a market out of the US, it may be appropriate to submit to some of them, too. Euroseek is a directory of European sites in several languages. Most of the major search engines have a couple of foreign-language versions that you can submit to separately.
6. Most search engines send out an email confirmation message when you register with them. These messages should come to you, the webmaster. Keep them, as some contain passwords that you may need to modify your data later. They also serve as confirmation that your submitter is at least doing something.
7. Any submitter worth his or her salt goes back to the majors a month later and checks that the site really did get added. If not, try, try again. While a professional submitter can't be expected to follow up more than once or twice, the wise webmaster will do so periodically, and resubmit when necessary. There are various automated ways of checking to see that your site is still listed, Web Position Analyzer for one.

Be especially wary of submitters who claim to have some sneaky trick that they use to guarantee you top placement in search engines (one company boasts of a patented process that "force feeds" pages to the search engines). The search engines wage a continuous battle with these characters, and they may refuse your submission if they deem that you are trying to "unfairly" influence rankings.

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