1.4 Submitting to Search Engines

Search engines will automatically crawl and index a site, eventually, but it can also be subitted directly to them. It's probably not worth submitting to any more than the big 3, Google, Yahoo and MSN, and possibly Ask (Jeeves) also, as many others use data from these anyway in their results. And as these have the market share anyway, it's not really worth submitting to lesser known engines. Don't pay to submit to companies who promise to submit to thousands of search engines either for the very same reasons.

Submitting to Ask (Jeeves) is a little more difficult. First you need to create an XML sitemap file called sitemap.xml, and then enter the following "ping address" into your browser address bar: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml.

Before submitting to search engines, make sure your site is as friendly as possible to search robots by:

  • Ensuring any page is reachable from the main page in no more than three mouse clicks. If this is not possible, create a site map that will allow this;
  • Creating a site map for sites with more than a dozen or so pages;
  • Not using pages with content larger than 100Kb if you wish them to be indexed completely. Search engines index no more than the first 100-200Kb of text;
  • Getting quality inbound links. The more inbound links, the more quickly a site gets re-indexed.

Sitemaps

In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file (usually called sitemap.xml) that lists all the URLs of the web pages for a site. It can be written using a simple text editor like Microsoft Notepad, and is normally stored in the root directory next to the web pages and assists search engine crawlers in indexing your site. See http://sitemaps.org/ for a guide to making a sitemap.

In addition to this, it is useful to also make another sitemap for visitors in the form of a HTML file listing all the page links on your site.