Search Engine Submission

Making sure that your website is listed in search engines can make all the difference in being a successful site owner.

One important aspect to running a successful website, whether for personal or commercial purposes, is to attract more visitors to your site. With the advance of the Internet, it is hard to distinguish your own website from the hundreds and thousands of other sites; no matter how interesting your contents are, sometimes it is just not enough. Search engine optimization has, therefore, become an important industry that helps website operators to increase readership, as well as web users to locate information more accurately. It is a process that makes sure search engines "know" that your page exist, and subsequently, improves the ranking of your page within the search results.

One of the initial steps of search engine optimization is search engine submission. By submitting your website to a search engine, you can be sure that the site will be included in the search engine database. One easy way to get your website listed through search engine submission is to submit to an open directory, such as the Yahoo! Directory. Once your website is listed in a directory, it will be more likely to be picked up by an automatic categorizing "crawler" such as Google. Google and other crawlers also offer search engine submission options; while Google's "Add URL" function does not guarantee listing, it is a good way to increase the chance of getting listed. On the other hand, Yahoo offers a paid service that will guarantee the listing of your website.

There is another option of search engine submission via paid listing, which entails essentially an ad space on the search engine's result page. Google AdWords is a good example of such a program offered by a search engine. While your website is not directly listed with the remainder of the results, it does show up according to the keywords searched by web users, and therefore increases the chance of bringing in more visitors who are looking for relevant information. Other ways of search engine submission include better page design, improving contents, and using meta tags so that your page will be better recognized by the various search engines.