Maxmillian*s Gold: Submitting Your Web Site to Search Engines
	Written by: Ronald J. Saunders Web Site:   MaxmillianSoft Software

The importance of submitting your web site to a search engine is paramount. If you consider the methods that most people use to search the internet, you will begin to understand that the search engines are how most people find what they are looking for on the internet. Even though you may spend a great deal of time thinking of a catchy easy to remember domain name, many people will forget it, will be unsure of the exact spelling, or forget where that dash was supposed to go in the name. These are just some of the reasons that people will turn to a search engine to find your particular web site. Most sites can rely on search engines for any where from 40% to a full 100% of their overall site traffic, depending on the types and volume of other advertising sources in use. Even sites that use zero advertising can rely upon search engines to send them traffic, so long as the site is in the search engines databases. The volume of traffic received from the search engine depends strongly upon how well a site is positioned in the search engine result pages (SERP’s) for keywords relevant to the stated purpose and product/service offerings of the website. For best results, a site seeking traffic from the search engines should be in the first two pages of results --- generally the top 20 sites listed. AN OVERVIEW OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SEARCH ENGINES When looking at the statistics for various search engines and the traffic generated by the search engines, it becomes even more apparent that being listed in the search engine results are crucial. According to http://www.searchenginewatch.com/, from December of 2004, search specific search engine results were derived from: Google - 35% Yahoo - 32% MSN - 16% AOL - 9% Excite - 4% AskJeeves - 2% Others - 2% These results are consistent with other search engine statistics found on the Internet. Far and away Google and Yahoo are the top two search engines that deliver results, followed by MSN and AOL. Each of the above is a Spider Search Engine. Most of these sites also include an internal Directory. A Directory and a Spider are two different types of engines. A Directory is an organized set of links put together by human beings. A Spider is software that visits a site and archives what it finds. Some spiders archive an entire site, while others archive only the first few hundred words on each page. Google takes all of the data found on a website and generates their SERP’s from all of the content taken from a site. Some of the most well known Directories are: Yahoo DMOZ.org (Open Directory) LookSmart HOW TO SUBMIT DIRECTLY TO POPULAR SEARCH ENGINE DATABASES Below are direct submission links for some of the more popular search engines- Google- http://www.google.com/intl/en/addurl.html Yahoo- http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html MSN- http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 AOL (now takes all of their search results from the Google database) http://www.google.com/intl/en/addurl.html Excite- https://secure.ah-ha.com/guaranteed_inclusion/teaser.aspx AskJeeves- has discontinued accepting submissions http://sp.ask.com/docs/ad/p8a.html AN OVERVIEW OF SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION SERVICES Search engine submission services can be a great asset to those who do not wish to spend the time or energy doing it themselves. Different search engine submission services offer a variety of pros and cons depending on what kind of service you are wanting. www.addme.com offers a free submission service that will place your web site into 14 different search engines. For a fee, based upon how many sites you wish to submit, they offer a submission services that places your web site into 1,500 search engines. The paid services also offer a page analyzer and many other features. www.freewebsubmission.com offers, as the name implies, a free submission service. Signing up with them is a very simple straightforward process. They offer a no frills type service, just a cut and dry submission of your web site into 20 search engines. www.submitexpress.com is similar to addme.com in services offered. You have a choice between a free submission service that will place your site into 40 search engines, or a paid service that will place your web site into a reported 75,000 search engines. They also offer special features with a paid subscription. Prices are comparable to those at addme.com. www.submit-it.com does not offer any free search engine submission. They have only three available pricing packages but do offer a number of special features that come with the paid subscription. AUTOMATE TASKS USING SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION SOFTWARE Smart web site owners utilize search engine tools in the process of getting their web site submitted to search engines. These search engine tools automate much of the process for you and can save you a great deal of time. Doing all of the necessary tasks on your own would take hours upon hours to complete. Two examples of search engine software tools Are Web Submission Gold, and MaxmillianSoft MaxEasy Website Submitter. The Web Submission Gold software optimizes web pages and submits them to top ranking search engines, while tracking search engine rankings and web site traffic. It also offers advice on how to optimize your web pages as well as suggestions for keywords that will increase your sites traffic. This product will support up to five web pages and can generate a large amount of data for you to analyze if you wish. This product retails for $349.00. The MaxmillianSoft MaxEasy Website Submitter offers website submission to 66 search engines. While other search engine tools state that they will submit to more websites, it is rather futile to worry about these other search engines that actually provide very little traffic. Once MaxmillianSoft MaxEasy Website Submitter places your website into Google, it will show up in nearly all of the other search engine databases as well! Another advantage of MaxEasy is that it is very simple so understand and use. Why overload yourself with data that you do not need. Best of all, this software retails for a mere $9.95, quite a price difference! HOW OFTEN TO SUBMIT YOUR SITE One question that website owners often ask is “how often should I submit my website to a search engine?” This will vary dependent upon the search engine that you are utilizing. As a general rule for search engines you should resubmit your website every time you make any major changes or add new content to it. Others recommend once every 90 days for spider search engines and once for directories. IN CONCLUSION So as you can see there are many reasons to submit a website to a search engine. Primarily, if you do not submit it, you will hardly get any traffic whatsoever. If you want traffic, you need to submit your website to the search engine databases; and if you want more traffic than your competitors, then you need to utilize a website submission tool that will allow you to stand above the competition. If you do not want to spend a lot of your time working to beat your competitors to the top of the search engines, then you need to use a search engine tool, because most likely they are using them too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: All articles in the Maxmillian*s Gold Series are written by: Ronald. J. Saunders, owner of http://www.Maxmillian.com and http://www.Maxmillian.net. ~~~ Maxmillian.com Provides Turnkey Website Services ~~~ Our company provides a comprehensive service of website development, domain name selection and registration, affordable hosting, and first class, high quality web site templates. We are your resource for website authoring and the home of MaxmillianSoft software. http://www.Maxmillian.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~