Preparation for Search Engine Submission

Site should be complete.
Relevant Content

Choosing Meta tags

Choosing your Title
"unique" keywords, Descriptive
Appearance of Common Words
Length of <title> - number of characters in the title tag must be less than 75

Thumbrule
<title>{Unique identifier of your site}{Descriptive keyword 1}{Descriptive keyword 2}{Descriptive keyword 3} ....</title>

Key Words
unique, Descriptive, Position, Appearance of Common Words
Number of <keywords> - The ideal number of keywords in the meta keywords is 10
But keywords can include up to 1000 characters of text.
Try to incorporate singular and plural cases of words, as well as active and passive verbs.
Capitalization : Some search engines are casesensitive. But most people search with lower case, so stick to the lower case and avoid spamming. eg., entertainment, Entertainment, ENTERTAINMENT.

Not Case Sensitive
AOL Search, Excite, Google, Lycos, WebCrawler

Notes
Case sensitivity at HotBot is true for its Inktomi-powered results and should be
 true for Inktomi results at other services, such as at MSN Search and Snap.

At Go (Infoseek), two adjacent words capitalized on the first letter
 produces a phrase search.

Description
Length of <description> - The ideal number characters is 200 so that almost all the search engines will pick up at least 75% of the description that you give. Now if you want to be absolutely sure restrict the description length to 150 characters.

Saving from ROBOT
If a page is not to be indexed by robots then add this code :
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

HTM & Body
Keywords in HTML text <h1>tags
HTML Text Links
NAME and ALT attributes
First paragraphs of the text are the most important.

Generate your META Tags
http://www.websitegarage.com

Check your HTML
http://validatr.w3.org
http://www2.imgiware.com/RxHTML

Special Methods to increase ranking
Directory page / Site Map
Select Key words

A check list

Create Keyword List

• Have you chosen a keyword or key phrase and search the major engines using it, noting the results?
• Have you analyzed the top pages listed above and developed a long keyword list?
• Have you created a Top 10 keyword / key phrase list from the long list above?

Select Web Site Title

• Does your web site title contain your most relevant keywords?
• Was your Web Site Title designed to appear at the top of alphabetical listings?
• Was your Web Site Title designed to build confidence in people who see it?
• Does each topical subsite or directory home page have its own well designed title?

Select Categories

• Have you searched a category based site to determine under what categories sites similar to yours are listed under?
• Have you preselected as many relevant categories as possible?
• When you are at a submission site, did you spend all the time necessary to choose the best categories?
• Did you choose the maximum number of categories you are allowed?
• Did you choose categories by highest relevancy first and alphabetical positioning second?
• Did you verify that the name of the category matched the sites listed under it?

Write Descriptions

• Did you spend significant time designing descriptions that fit search engine results?
• Does your description include keywords, provide information, and provide a compelling reason for people to visit your site?
• Did you make your description compelling by: making it newsworthy, stating the biggest benefit for coming to your site, offering people something for coming to your site, or using your Unique Selling Proposition?

Design your Web pages for top of the list ranking

• Is your <TITLE> designed to include keywords, be compelling, make sense when returned by search engines, flow logically with your META description, look good in browsers title bars and bookmark lists?
• Did you optimize your META description tag to work well for the number of characters returned by the major search engines?
• Does your META description contain the most powerful components of your site description?
• Did you include in your META keyword tag, your top keywords / key phrases?
• Have you made use of image ALT="" tags?
• Have you made use of image NAME="" tags?
• If you make use of image maps, have you provided a text based navigation system that can be followed by all search engine robots?
• If you are using Javascript or a framed site, have you used compensating designs to improve listing performance?
• Are you using keyword based Urls?
• Have you broken your site up into keyword / key phrase content specific web pages?
• Have you designed each content unique web page in your site with the same care and attention as your main submission page.
• Have you designed the links among pages at your site so that they can be followed by indexing robots?
• Have you included a reciprocal link page in your site?

Site Submission
Submit Your Key Pages to all the major search engines.

Big Six Search Engines / Directories

The most important search engines and directories and the way in which you have to register your site with them is briefly outlined below :

Yahoo !

Yahoo is the most prestigious web directory. A listing in Yahoo ensures a lot of traffic to your site. But Yahoo is the also the most difficult to get a entry in !

The primary thing in Yahoo is to decide the category in which your site must go.

The Yahoo ! registering procedure is explained in detail at http://howto.yahoo.com/capters/10/1.html

Open Directory Project

As the web grows, automated search engines and directories with small editorial staffs will be unable to cope with the volume of sites. The Open Directory Project's goal is to produce the most comprehensive directory of the web, by relying on a vast army of volunteer editors.

The dmoz registering procedure is explained in detail at http://dmoz.org/add.html

AltaVista

AltaVista is probably the largest collection of Urls. Its one of the most popular and widely used search engines because of the wealth of information, ease of use and popularity. It also links tot OPD for Directory listing. Registering a site to AltaVista is easy and the exact procedure is available at : http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl

HotBot / Lycos

HotBot is also a very largely relied search engine and its a part of the large Lycos network. You can register your site to HotBot at :http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp and you can register in Lycos at :http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html

Excite / Web crawler

Excite and webcrawler are associated search engines. The uniqueness of excite lies in the fact that, it does not give any importance to meta tags. It considers only the body text and title tag

Your can register your site in Excite at : http://www.excite.com/info/add_url
and you can register in Webcrawler at : http://www.webcrawler.com/info/add_url/
This page actually links to the same database as in the case of excite, the search results differ due to change in technology to search and list the results.

Google

Google is fast becoming a very popular search engine due to its unique search and listing technology, the relevance and accuracy of results and the uncluttered interface.

You can add your site to the google index by registering at : http://www.google.com/addurl.html

There are a lot more web search engines. Though it is is not possible to manually register in all these sites, it is essential to register in the above six main search engines /directories .. manually. For others there are some web based utilities.

Web based Utilities
1. http://register-it.netscape.com
2. http://www.addme.com
3. http://www.selfpromotion.com