MasterNetworker Article #94 - March 31, 2001

TEN PLACES WHERE YOU MUST SUBMIT YOUR SITE
(Seven still-free listings and three worth paying for.)

By Jim Daniels

This tutorial will not promise you a top search engine position. It will also not reveal how to get your site into thousands of search engines.

Instead, you will discover the exact locations where you can submit your website for free and the few "paid submissions" that are actually worth the price.

Yes, there ARE still places where you can submit your website for free. There are actually seven extremely busy search engines that have not (not yet anyway) migrated to requiring payment for listings.

Here's a listing of these engines along with the URLs where you can add your site(s) for free:

  1. Lycos: Add URL: http://home.lycos.com/addasite.html
     
  2. Google: Add URL: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
     
  3. HotBot: Add URL: http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
     
  4. Northern Light: Add URL: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
     
  5. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project: Add URL: http://dmoz.org/add.html
     
  6. Direct Hit - An Ask Jeeves Service: Add URL: http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html
     
  7. Fast - (Formerly "All the Web"): http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3

    Those seven search engines above have been responsible for sending literally thousands of visitors to my website over the past year. And they will send thousands more. And perhaps the best part is that I didn't have to pay them a dime.

    But that's not to say that paying for a listing in a search engine is a bad thing. Sure, lots of "purists" have been bashing the search engines' move to charging for listings. But let's face it, they are in business to make money too. And advertising revenue is not what it used to be for many of these companies. Their CPM (cost per 1000 banner impressions) rate has dropped significantly and they need other revenue sources. So why not charge businesses for a listing?

    Now as a small business owner you cannot go around and start paying every search engine that wants a hundred bucks or more just for the privilege of listing your site (or just considering it!) So you have to concentrate your budget on just the search engines that can deliver serious website traffic. Those are the engines, or networks of engines with the most traffic themselves.

    After researching the field, I've narrowed this down to just three that are undoubtedly worth the price. They are...

     

  8. Yahoo! Business Express: http://help.yahoo.com/help/bizex/

    Currently $199 for non-adult sites, Yahoo! still has the busiest directory by far and you'll get lots of traffic from a decent listing.
     
  9. The Looksmart Network's Express Submit: http://submit.looksmart.com/

    Also $199, this network powers over 1/2 million websites including AltaVista, CNN, Excite, iWon, Microsoft Network, Netscape Netcenter, NetZero and WebCrawler.
     
  10. Inktomi's Search/Submit service: www.networksolutions.com/catalog/searchsubmit/welcome.jhtml

    At just $30 a year for the first URL and $15 for each additional, this is a cheaper solution to the Looksmart Network submission. Inktomi powers searches through AOL, iWon, MSN and the Looksmart directory itself. The best part is that the network updates every 48 hours so you get your listing in quickly.

OK, there you have it. A quick, cut to the chase, search engine submission guide. Just be sure that before you submit your site to ANY search engine or network that your site is ready to be listed favorably. This means adding targeted keywords to your content, META tags and title as well as spell checking and browser checking your site. Once you are sure everything is set to go, visit those 10 URLs and submit your site!

 

Tutorial by Jim Daniels of http://www.bizweb2000.com Jim's new, no-hype, step-by-step Guide to Making a Living from the Internet is at http://www.make-a-living-online.com Read Jim's free web-based guide and discover how you could make your living online.