Submit your Site for Success

As the image from Compete Blog shows, searches on the major engines are slowing down. It also explains why you need to submit your site to only the three that have nearly all of the U.S. search market. In April, Google had almost 70%, followed by Yahoo at 15% and MSN at about 8%. Many other search engines derive results from these three. Submitting your site is free and not too complicated.

If your target audience uses a particular specialty search engine and expects your site to be listed there, be sure to submit your website to that specialty engine.

Also submit your site to The Open Directory Project. This is a human-edited directory. Search engines index that content too and display results. DMOZ is a volunteer project, and it does not accept all sites that are submitted. When you sign up, it is up to you to first find the category that best fits your site. As with the top search engines, the Open Directory feeds many others.

However, Yahoo! has the best known directory, and it was the basis for their early success. It is not free, though. Don't confuse Yahoo’s directory with their search engine. You may submit your website to both.

Another step you can take to get your new website showing up in search results sooner is to prepare a sitemap and submit it to Google (especially) and to Yahoo. This special file is a bit tricky and complicated to create, but gives the search engines a heads up that your site exists and which pages to spider and how often. A good, free service for automatically generating a sitemap is SitemapsPal.