Promote Your Website - Search ToolsMany companies after spending a substantial amount of money on development of their websites assume that once website is published on Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore, do not take website promotion as seriously as development part of it. Today, with millions of websites around, no matter how great your website is, if you don’t promote it effectively, you will not get visibility that your site deserves.
Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of site to various search tools available on Internet. There are two different types of search tools – search engines and directories. Search engines index their listings based on information retrieved by their spiders that crawl through Internet following links constantly looking for new websites. The directory listings are compiled by human editors from URLs submitted to directory. If your website is listed in directories you can be sure that spiders of different search engines sooner or later will index your site. That’s why you should start submitting your website first from search directories.
Search Directories
Among all search directories available on Internet, Yahoo! and DMOZ are most important ones.
Open Directory Project or DMOZ
DMOZ is second largest human compiled search directory on Internet after Yahoo! Open Directory Project is a huge web directory of Internet resources. All submission to directory is evaluated by volunteer editors. There is no fee to be paid to get an inclusion in directory. As a human edited directory it might take more than a month to get your site evaluated. Once you are listed in DMOZ, within two weeks to two months your website will start appearing on search engines like AOL Search, Teoma, HotBot, Google, Lycos, AllTheWeb, Excite, Go2Net and a number of regional search engines. At present around 354 different search engines and portals use data from Open Directory Project. This is one of main reasons why you must consider submitting your website to DMOZ.
Submitting your site to directories is a bit trickier then submitting to search engines.
Following rules are common for almost all directories:
* Check to see if your website is already in directory * Write an objective description of your website * Search out specific subcategory from directory hierarchy * Follow rules of submission as specified
Make sure you follow these rules while adding your website in DMOZ. This will improve your chance to get your website accepted and reduce processing time. Yahoo!
Yahoo! is by far number one destination for Internet surfers. Although search results for Yahoo! is provided by Google, many people still prefer to browse through Yahoo! directory to find whatever they are looking for. This makes an inclusion to Yahoo! directory quite valuable for ecommerce sites. Yahoo! presently charges yearly fee of US $299 for each web site submitted. The fee is nonrefundable, which means if for some reasons Yahoo! declines to add your website in its directory you will not get your money back! The only thing Yahoo! guarantees is that editors will look at your submission within seven days and send you an answer.
Should you consider submitting your site to Yahoo!? It all depends on kind of business you are in. Some sites receive an overwhelming number of traffic from Yahoo!, others hardly receive anybody. My suggestion: list your website in Yahoo! directory for a year and see outcome. If you feel comfortable with result you are receiving – continue. If result is not satisfactory you can always cancel their service after one year. LookSmart
Although it is third largest directory on Internet as a search portal LookSmart is not that popular. However, it provides directory listings to MSN search, About.com, Infospace, Inktomi and others. It is probably still best way to get high ranking in MSN search. LookSmart is a fee based service. You pay US $49 submission fee for site review by their editors and 15 Cents for each click through. Pay per click minimum monthly payment is US $15.
For noncommercial sites LookSmart has a partner directory named “Zeal”. Zeal is a community directory for Internet surfers. To submit a site to Zeal you first have to become a member by passing a quiz test. The reason I am mentioning Zeal here is – you can actually submit noncommercial portion of your site to Zeal and receive an appearance in all of places that LookSmart listings show up, without paying a pay-per-click fee.