Getting Ahead in

Submitting your pages

A word of caution, though - do not submit your site everywhere! There are places you do not want to submit - most notably, Free For All (FFA) sites. These sites do nothing to help. You won't get any traffic from them, and you will certainly get lots of spam in return. Beware of offers to 'submit your site to 10,000 sites' as these almost always include FFA sites.

Focus instead on a few dozen key sites - like Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL Web Sites, Excite, Netscape search, Open Directory Project, AllTheWeb, About.com, Alta Vista, HotBot, Look Smart, etc.

Web Position Gold has another component that helps tremendously with this task. The Submitter module allows you to choose which search engines and directories to submit to and does most of them for you. There are a few, like Open Directory Project and Yahoo, that require manual submission - but WPG will guide you through those as well.

For the purpose of this article, we're going to concentrate on Google. Before submitting, we want to find out if Google even knows about our pages. Go to www.google.com and type in:

site:www.thisisthenameofmysite.com   (Of course adding YOUR domain name after site:)

If you get a result, then you know your site is already known by Google. Now the goal is to show up in your keyword searches.

Now that you have a page that is optimized for specific keywords, and you know that Google knows about your page, we need to convince Google that your page is important enough to list before all others (or at least on the first page of results) when someone puts your keywords in the search box.

How does Google decide what order to place the different sites in? Google engineers have developed their own algorithm to determine the importance of each page and rank them accordingly. Once you've optimized your page for a certain keyword (which allows Google to recognize your important keyword), the most important single factor is the number of other pages that link to your page.

Google figures that if many other pages think enough of your site to have links to your page, it must be of value. The more incoming links you have, the better.

There are two major types of links, internal links and links from the outside. You can control your internal links, since these are links on your own site. You want to make sure every page on your site has a link from your front page. If your site is large, and adding a link to every other page on your site would mess up the design of your front page, create a 'Site Map' page and put a link to it on your front page. While a site map can be useful to visitors, their primary function is to make sure search engines can find every page on your site. This way you only have to submit one page to the search engines and when they visit your site, they'll find the link to your site map and then discover all the other pages on your site. This is called 'crawling' your site.

Many experts believe it is better not to submit your site at all, but let your site be found through links to it. This may add a month or two to the time it takes for the search engines to find you, but these experts feel the wait is worth it.

While we're on the subject, Google also likes sites that has lots of valuable unique content. The more pages the better, and the more in depth your subject is covered the better. If you can, try to add one or two pages a month to your site, each page a different sub topic of your site's main theme, and each page optimized for another keyword or two.

Another good way to attract visitors to your site is by adding message forums, where visitors can write to each other, discussing topics that are pertinent to your site. By adding message forums to your site you can become a central meeting place for those who share your passion or buy your products. Adding pages that contain valuable information or adding a message forum will also increase your natural inbound links.

Now to start getting links from other sites to yours!

Next: Getting Inbound Links

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