Web visitors generally use search engines to find sites matching their search criteria. The visitor enters words or phrases in the search area, and the search engine produces a list of related sites. The search engine provides this information after conducting a more comprehensive search using indexing software agents, often called "robots" or "spiders".

These robots and spiders are programmed to "crawl" the Internet in search of new or updated web sites. The search engine becomes aware of a new site to visit and index when that site is submitted.

Submitting your URL to a number of search engines increases the odds of potential customers finding your site through traditional online searches. You can further increase your chances of being found through a search by adding relevant keywords to your home page title and text.

Search engines are one of the least expensive and most successful forms of online marketing. If you're serious about reaching new visitors, submitting your site to search engines is essential.

You want to keep your web site registration current. Link Pages move older links to the bottom of the list, and resubmitting puts you back on top. Search engines have a tendency to drop or lose sites from time to time. Resubmitting monthly ensures your site won't get lost. Some web sites offer "What's New" sections. Each time you submit, your site gets added to these lists.

Our service submits to the major search engines and several hundred link pages. Each month we'll send you a detailed report via e-mail listing all the search engines, directories and links pages that your site was submitted to, so you can keep track of the submission process.

After successfully submitting your web site to a search engine or directory, it's up to those organizations to list your site. Most search engines will send a "spider" to your site within a few weeks of submission. The spider will read and index your web site and schedule your site to be listed. It usually takes 6-8 weeks before your site appears on major search engines.

The most likely reason that you cannot find your site is that it has a low ranking in the search return. This may be because your site is not optimized for the keywords you entered. It is also possible that the search engine's "spider" has not yet visited your site and this is also adversely affecting the ranking and making it difficult to locate the site in the search return. If you continued to search through the search return, you would eventually find your site.

The easiest way to determine if your site is in the search engine's database is to enter the full URL provided with your submission order. For example, enter www.your-domain-name.com in the search box of the top search engine Google (www.google.com). If you are unhappy with your ranking, we suggest that you optimize your site to help improve your ranking.

The best way to determine your keywords is to step out of your shoes and imagine yourself as one of your customers or prospects. How do you think these people will search for sites like yours? What keywords do you think they will enter into the search engines?

Create a list of all of the words that apply to your business, including your business name, product names (both brand and generic names) and the names of the geographic regions you serve. You may also want to consider variations of these words (such as "dog, dogs, doggie, etc) and common misspellings of important keywords.

When developing your list of keywords, you should consider all of the possible keywords your customers and prospects may use. Spend a few days thinking it over. Ask a few of your customers what keywords they would use. Build as large of a list as possible, while still keeping the keywords relevant to your business. Once you have a complete list, you can then rank the importance of they keywords to determine which are the most important to your company.

Some search engines will only allow us to submit 25 keywords on your behalf. Others compute the relevancy of your keywords by dividing the number of keyword matched in a search by the total of keywords submitted. We therefore limit your keyword list to 25 keywords to ensure that you select keywords that are the most relevant to your site and that will generate the highest ranking in the search returns.

A meta tag (or tag) tells the search engine what your site is about. The major search engines will review your site and read your meta tags to determine categories for your site. Meta tags tell the search engine your site's title, description and keywords. Without these tags, it's difficult for your site to achieve a high ranking on many major search engines.

Yes. If your site doesn't have meta tags, you're missing potential traffic. A web site without meta tags is tough for a search engine to place correctly.

Title:
The title is probably the most important part of your site to evaluate, as it is the most frequently searched component by search engines. It should state exactly what your site is about and include your most important keywords. An example of a good title would be, "XYZ Interior Designs - Decorating UK homes" or "John Smith - Personal Photography Blog".

Keywords:
The Meta Tag Keywords should be those words or phrases that you think people will use when trying to look for a site like yours on search engines. The right keywords for your web site should be specific enough to describe your web site's focus, yet general enough for potential customers to use as search criteria with search engines. Be sure to include your domain name, company name and product's name in the keywords.

Description:
Your web site description should be a 20 word summary of the content of your site. This description should contain some of the keywords and should avoid marketing jargon. An example of a good description would be, "A full service provider of interior design services: decorating, painting, furniture and colour schemes for your home."

The meta tags should be inserted between the <head> and </head> tags of HTML your document. Below is an example of how to format meta tags and where to place them:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your Site Title goes here</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="Your keywords go here, separated by a comma">
<meta name="description" content="Your site description goes here">
</head>
<body> .. Page content is placed here .. </body>
</html>

When filling out the registration form, you should use the same title, description and keywords as those specified in the meta tags included in your site's code. To ensure this process, you can use our meta tag generator. At the end of the registration process, you will receive an e-mail with auto-generated meta tag code for your site. Simply copy and paste this code into your HTML editor and then upload the page to your server.

We've seen these offers, too. How many search engines do you go to when you're looking for something on the Internet? Submission companies that offer 2,000 submissions are simply sending your web site to small niche directories. These pages may no longer exist and in many cases were set up to collect e-mail addresses to use or sell. Be careful if you're using one of these submission services. In the web site promotion game, quality wins over quantity.