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You've finished your website, and it's beautiful. You ensured it
would be content rich; you have a plan to maintain fresh
content, whether it's through blogs or rotating content. You
hired a professional writer to ensure that your content was
keyword optimized for the search engines, to raise its rank.
You've even paid attention to tags and how they are focused on
your web page, and image descriptions for your graphics.
So now you can submit it to the search engines, right?
Wrong. You don't want to submit at all.
The Right Way To Be Found
Instead of submitting directly to search engines, allow your
page to be found naturally. The spiders are constantly running
down the trail of every link, cataloguing where pages are and
recording them in the search engine database. Allowing your site
to be found this way allows it to rise naturally in the search
engines as each new link is catalogued and included in your
placement algorithm.
What you want, then, is to be found because of links to your
site. If you're starting with a fresh slate, you should first
list your site with directories. Directories appear similar to
search engines, and are used, like search engines, to find sites
of interest. But search engines use spiders to fill a dynamic
database. Directories, on the other hand, are dependent upon
manual registration of each site. If you want your site to show
up in directories, you need to do it yourself or pay someone
else to do it.
The best part about directories is that each one provides you
with a one-way link to your website - the exact thing that the
search engine spiders seek out.
The Major Directories
For years, Yahoo! has been recognized as the premier online
directory. That's only natural; it started life as a list of
Jerry Yang's favourite links in 1994. Today, Yahoo! has both a
search engine component, included in 1998 as a feed from Alta
Vista, and a directory component. You should submit your site to
the Yahoo! directory manually; certain sites may have to pay to
be listed.
The other major directory is Dmoz, an open directory that shares
its data freely with hundreds of other websites. Dmoz is always
free to list with, and is surprisingly underused.
With either major directory, you should list your site by hand
yourself; only you can properly determine what category you
should appear in, and your categorization is critical to how
well you're ranked by the search engines; list in the wrong one,
and you won't make a dent.
Other Directories
Besides the major directories, there are thousands of free
directories for every imaginable niche market; you should list
with any of these that are appropriate to your site content.
In addition to the free directories, there are a number of paid
directories you can list with. Though you should first go ahead
and register with the larger free directories you find out
there, later you should go back and register with some of the
paid sites as well. Not everyone will pay to acquire this link,
and many of the paid sites are seen by the search engines as
more authoritative, and will be weighted more heavily than other
directories.
About the author:
Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster for http://www.indexplex.com a
leading Web Directory
Please feel free to republish this article together with working
hyperlinks.
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