2.2. Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:

• A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the search engine's index.

• Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search for a particular keyword or phrase.

To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.

"Unless you have money to burn, I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves or by third parties."

If you have inbound links links to your sites from other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your site eventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?

"It's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!"

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited results but at least the price is right!

"Getting a site listed in an online categorized directoryparticularly the Open Directory Project (ODP) or Yahoo's directory as I explain in "Working with Directories" later in this chapteris probably the most effective way to get inclusion in the search engines themselves."

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process up by manually submitting your site to search engines.

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