[thelist] Query: search engine submission and ranking

[Tom Dell'Aringa]

--- Osaurus <osaurus at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I wonder if few of you can clarify something for me regarding
> search-engine submissions...

"Search engine submissions" are somewhat of a snake-oil salesmans
trick. In fact, without paying big money, you'll never get anything
directly submitted to Yahoo!

The problem you really want to tackle is how you are authoring.
Following good solid practices such as valid and key text instead of
images, mimimal use of tables, a good hierarchy (smart use of H#
tags) and even the order stuff appears on your page make your site
more relevant. Googling the topic will bring up lots of good stuff.

Google is a spider and crawls the web of its own volition (although
you can submit a URL). When it does spider your page, you'll get
placed appropriately based on *how well you authored your pages* and
not some search engine trick. In fact, Google etc are pretty wise to
the tricks and will penalize you for them.

The Google ranking is your first job. Yahoo! has changed lately, they
used to actually show Google results, I'm not sure what they are
showing right now. So I'll defer on that.

For other engines and spiders, feel free to manually submit, if they
offer it. The key is to follow their instructions. 

But as for "blasting" your URL to "thousands" of search engines, its
bunk. Don't EVER pay for such a service! Why would you want your
train site listed in some search engine about dolls? The key players
are Google, AOL search, MSN and Yahoo! basically, Google being #1. If
you find other, targeted search engines/directories that make sense
for you, then do the submission work - the engines you really need to
be a part of you can do yourself - and *should* do yourself.

In the end, it's all about the content on your site and how its built
that makes the difference in the beginning. Then its about how often
your site is visited - and if you pay for placement. 

A well done, targeted site that doesn't have a million competitors
should be able to get in on the first couple/few pages, and that's a
job well done IMO. You can tweak from there.

This is really a huge topic and a speciality all unto itself, I hope
this *brief* intro has helped somewhat, certainly others will chime
in as well.

Tom

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