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Promotion Tip:
Think Before You Submit
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
If a bakery sold you a loaf of half-baked bread, you'd probably never go back. If human visitors to your Web site find an animated "under construction" graphic instead of useful information, they aren't likely to return either. Search engine robots also get confused and may not index your site correctly or give it a high ranking.
Eager webmasters often submit their sites to search engines without finishing them or optimizing the content to appeal to search engines. Fortunately, this common mistake is also one of the most preventable.
Before You Submit...
While you can easily tell if your content is complete, it's harder to know if your underlying HTML code is optimized for search engine robots. At a minimum, each page in your site should include the following:
- TITLE tag: Include a descriptive title for each page in your Web site.
- META tags: Include your keywords and page descriptions inside the META tags.
- ALT tags on images: An informative description of each image can help you with search engines and makes it much easier for visitors with text-based browsers to use your site.
- Keywords: Include the ones listed in your META tag throughout your page content to increase their relevance to search engines.
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NetMechanic's Page Primer analyzes your page, grades it based on how well it might score with various search engines, and identifies innocent design techniques that may get you banned from some search engines. Use Page Primer to check each page of your site before you submit to search engines.
Once your page is ready, submit it to search engines. Check each week and resubmit until your site appears. You may wait a long time because the tremendous number of new site submissions has some engines backlogged for weeks - even months. Directories can take even longer: a six-month wait for a Yahoo listing isn't unusual.
Waiting For The Spider
Since sites don't get listed in a timely manner, webmasters have to resubmit them multiple times to insure the sites get indexed - further adding to the backlog. Other listing delays occur because some search engines limit their databases to a certain size, effectively blocking all new site submissions.
Earlier this year, Excite caused much excitement (and consternation) among webmasters when it closed its index to new sites for several months. Excite's database had grown so large that it stopped adding new sites or even refreshing its database for several months. Sites both inside and outside the database were penalized: new sites couldn't get in and listed sites couldn't improve their ranking because the spider wasn't revisiting to evaluate changes.
Other sites have spider problems when search engines unexpectedly drop sites. Webmasters have joked that HotBot should change its name to "HotBoot" since it has recently kicked out so many sites. HotBot maintains a fixed number of 500 million URLs in its index. Since new URLs are submitted every day, HotBot drops the older ones in an effort to keep its index fresh and up to date. As the Internet grows, the problem will only get worse so it's important to periodically resubmit your important pages to the search engines that consider a listing's age in their algorithms.
Resubmit Carefully And Selectively
Deciding when - and how - to resubmit your site to search engines can be tricky. You need to resubmit after you make major changes to your site because spiders won't automatically revisit the site. However, some search engines penalize sites that resubmit too often. Alta Vista is particularly strict about the frequency of site submissions and bans sites that frequently submit the same pages. This policy is part of their overall effort to control spam - Alta Vista's president stated in November 1999 that 95% of pages submitted to the search engine were spam. Other engines aren't as strict as Alta Vista, but they will ban sites that continually submit the same pages.
Another risk is that changes you make to improve your rank with one engine may hurt your rank with another. For this reason, be selective when you resubmit your site. If you're doing well on one search engine, don't resubmit it at all - don't tamper with success. Either resubmit by hand to search engines where you need to improve your rank or use a tool that lets you submit selectively, like NetMechanic's Search Engine Starter.
Netmechanic has recently released a suite of search engine optimization tools called Search Engine Power Pack: use it to optimize your pages, select keywords, write META tags, select which search engines to submit to, set up a schedule for automatic resubmissions, and track your progress in the search engines. Good luck with the search engines!
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