One of the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting your site/blog to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results in the long run, especially if your site cultivates good informative content.

The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself by contacting the search engine services and directories.

Examples

1) Add your URL to Google
2) Yahoo! Search Submission

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed with the necessary contents like the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant informative content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete.

While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including your name and contact information.

Submission to search engine tools does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite some time before they take up your site for review by human editors. So, you have to be patient and concentrate on making your site better, the rest will come in due time.

One important factor to remember while submitting a site , if you are running a website (instead of a blog), is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots.

What’s Next?
=> Search Engine Friendly Pages
=> How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers / Web Spiders
=> The Importance of Search Engines
=> What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The Crawler or The Spider acts as a Slave to the Master Search Engine.
Search Engines use spiders (also called crawlers) to index websites.
When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site.

Is The Spider, A spider?

A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. It follows the following steps:

Step1
Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects.
Step 2
The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed.
Step 3
It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well.
 Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t get excited and create a site with 500 pages!
Step 4
The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed.
 The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

Spider analogous to a book?

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos.. etc

Did you ever think what a Search Engines does when you use it?

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

Be careful not to fool the spider, it will bite you!

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. (so be careful to get hurt by the spider)

The spider is spiderman?

Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

What’s Next?
=> The Importance of Search Engines
=> Search Engine Friendly Pages
=> Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
=> What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.