The submission of your website to the search engines should be one of the very first steps you take when considering opening up your site to the world. If you are still in the early stages of creating your site, whatever it may be, chances are that you won’t show up in the search engines without letting them know that you are there. Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines out there don’t just stumble upon websites unless there is a link from another website to yours – and that site has to be recognized by them in order for them to see your site.
So how do you get started with the submission of your site? It’s actually a pretty easy task that you should be able to take care of in a short period of time. There are literally thousands of sites that you can submit your website to but for now I’m going to focus on the major players. I would suggest not using an automated service for submission at this point. After all, you can take about 10 minutes to submit to the big guys and it doesn’t cost you anything but your time.
Google, Yahoo, Bing, DMOZ -
Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/ – type in your website along with any comments you may have about your site and click “add url” – simple as that!
Yahoo – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit – click on “Submit a Website or Webpage” and enter your url – piece of cake!
Bing (formerly MSN Live Search) – http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx – Type in the letters seen in the “captcha” then type in your website, click “Submit URL” – done!
DMOZ open directory project – http://www.dmoz.org/add.html – for DMOZ you need to make sure your site is put in the correct directory and that your site conforms to the guidelines stated. This may take you a couple of minutes but you definately don’t want to skip over this one. When you are excepted into the directory (which can take weeks or months) the other search engines will give your site a little more recognition. You will also, over time, start to be noticed in the smaller search engines that you may not even heard of.
Now that you are done with the submission of your website to the search engines, you can focus more on the content of your site and trying to get higher rankings when people search for what you are offering.
Matt Bryant
