How and When to Submit Your Site to Search Engines

I always suggest starting to market your site with a carefully researched and crafted pay-per-click campaign. Then once sales are rolling in, it can be good to fill some of the gaps with a traditional search engine submission campaign.

Today, search engine submission has become somewhat of a science, and an artform. In highly competitive fields, it literally can become a full time job to not only learn how to optimize your pages, but also to maintain highest rankings. For others, it at least requires optimization for specific keywords and engines.

First of all, study up on each engine's proprietary internal algorithms. Sites such as searchenginewatch are great for this.

Familiarize yourself with the marketplace. Perform searches you think your customers would use to find you, and see who comes up. Then, analyze their pages by viewing their source code. How many keywords are placed in META tags, and how many are in the title, and body? Note that some sites may come up and baffle you as to why they got high listings. There are several reasons this can happen, usually the page they submitted to the engines has been swapped for another, and the engine hasn't had a chance to re-index yet.

Wordtracker is another great service. By signing up for their service, you can find out how many actual searches are being done for selected keywords. This can clue to in to trends in the marketplace months before you'll read about or see them on the news. Wordtracker can is a great tool in order to calculate the potential earnings of a campaign before you spend a penny on it. This is especially useful if you have already calculated your exact conversion ratio (ratio of visitors to sales). If not, you can generate several projections based on a realistic range of conversion rates (.1% to 4%, for instance).

Did you know that most engines can penalize you for having too many keywords, or keywords in the wrong places? Search engines will try to index sites they think are most relevant, with actual, useful content, not pages stuffed with keywords in vain attempts to trick them. Also, some engines totally ignore META tags, yet some utilize them more fully. Each have their own "secret" algorithms, which

Years ago, such techniques would "fool" the engines into indexing your site higher, while today such attempts will actually lower your ranking, or worse yet, ban you altogether from being indexed at all.

So, it's more important than ever to keep abreast of the ever-changing search engine rules and to produce high-quality pages with real content and submit to the search engines often.

Here are some tips that experts agree will rank you higher:

- create "doorway" pages, optimized for each keyword, and each engine. However, keep it legitimate by designing these to be attractive, and full of valuable content. Engines today have algorithms that identify pages stuffed with keywords as opposed to those that appear to have real content.

- Use a high-end software package such as WebPosition Gold to help you optimize according to current algorithms

- Design a catchy page title using your main keywords

- Your title should include a benefit, a reason your visitor should click on your site. Remember, your site may pop up with 9 others, so your title should not only have keywords, but be compelling

- Never use a free submission service. These take a single template and use a shotgun approach to auto-submit to thousands of engines. Only the top 14 or so matter. The rest are usually ways to get your e-mail address so that unscrupulous marketers can spam you later. Also, since each engine differs, you'll never get satisfactory results with this method. Ideally, each page should be optimized for each keyword, and each engine.

- For best results, use a totally manual submission service. These are the most expensive (costing up to $2000), but their results are the best you'll find anywhere. If you are selling a product or service on your site, then driving hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors searching specifically for you can literally translate into tens of thousands of dollars per year in revenue, or much higher.

Summary: Pay-per-click is the quickest, best way to gain top listings. Afterwards, it's a good idea to manually submit to major engines. Unlike a pay-per-click campaign, whereby you want to pre-qualify your prospects, search engines are a great place to entice people to visit for free things you may offer, since you are not paying for each visitor. Develop some free content if you don't have any, and use this to teach your visitors about your other offerings. Use it to build credibility and have a plan on how to convert them to a paying customer.

Be aware that if you have a simple corporate identity site, or online brochure, then driving lots of traffic to your site won't translate into revenue, no need to spend lots of money gaining traffic if this is the case. Submit your site to many engines, but don't spend thousands on SEO, that will never be earned back.

However, if you are selling a product or service, then you'll benefit greatly from having the experts optimize your site, create doorway pages optimized for each keyword, and each search engine. Consider pay-per-click first, and SEO later on to capture a different subset of your market.

Carl Johnson is the founder and owner of CompuGODs. He has been helping small businesses succeed on the Internet since 1999 as a freelance Web Designer, Trainer, and Internet Marketing Consultant.