Let The Search Begin By Registering Your Site
Newcastle Herald
Monday June 18, 2001
Q I HAVE made a simple website to promote my business. How can I let search engines know about it, so people can find it? A EVERY major search engine has a facility to let you register new pages.
For example, www.altavista.com has a link `Add your Web Site to AltaVista'. This is in small writing towards the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, most search sites follow this trend. So, be assured, there will be an `Add URL' or `Add Web site' link somewhere on the front page of all major search engines, but you may need to look carefully to find it.
Some search engines, like www.yahoo.com, organise web pages by category. This means when you submit your site you will need to nominate the particular category you believe your page fits into.
Other search engines operate by `spidering' your website, which means they will, over time, trawl through your front page and follow your links to new pages in your site, which are then also added to the search index. This process is then repeated with every one of these new pages, until finally, the search engine has catalogued and indexed every page in your site. In this case, results may take some time before they appear in search requests.
There are many search engines, and it can be helpful to use utilities that automate the submission process for you. At www.submit-it.com, for example, you can enter your information once and have this automatically sent to many different search engines. However, these services do charge a fee.
Services like Submit-It can help you by saving time, but by registering with each search engine individually you can try to customise your registration information to reflect the unique attributes of each search engine ? such as those using categories or hierarchies like Yahoo!. You can get advice regarding this, as well as pointers to the top 10 search engines from www.searchenginewatch.com.
It's also worthwhile looking for index sites. Unlike search engines, an index doesn't automatically list your site just because you send it information. Usually someone will review and evaluate your site before adding it to the list, which means being listed has some prestige. One of the most popular sites is Netscape's `What's New' page at http://new.netscape.com/new. David Williams is the Asia Pacific troubleshooter for Altitude Software. Send questions to: david.williams@altitude.com.
© 2001 Newcastle Herald
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