How to submit your site to search engines

Getting a high position in search engine listings is often seen as the Holy Grail of online marketing, for the simple reason that it brings free traffic to your website.

Some search engines such as Google and MSN provide free submission to their search listings. The difficult bit of course is getting somewhere on the first page.

But don't get hung up on it! On 123Live we find that around half our traffic comes from advertising and half is from free search results. The "paid for" traffic brings in nearly all of our enquiries. Some say that visitors are more likely to buy if they find you via a free listing, our experience shows the opposite to be true. It makes sense, people don't click on adverts for fun, they click because they want to buy.

Don't forget conventional advertising. Make sure your web address is on all your business cards, brochures, adverts, emails and products.

Submit your site for free

Google will find your site so long as it has a link from another site that it has already indexed, but you can also submit your site to Google here.

To submit to MSN's new engine go to http://beta.search.msn.co.uk/docs/submit.aspx

Submit to AltaVista (click "submit a site" at the bottom of the page)

Submit to ExactSeek - ExactSeek is a new search engine that does not rank sites on inward links but ranks on content relevance and site popularity as judged by users of the Alexa Toolbar.

You can submit your site to most of the other major search engines such as AOL Search, DirectHit, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape Search via the Open Directory Project (ODP). The ODP allows you to resubmit your site if it is not listed after three weeks. If you submit your site more often than this you risk being excluded from the directory.

Be patient, these search engines have a huge number of sites to trawl through so it may takes weeks or months before your are listed. submitting your site too often may have a negative effect.

Paid for directories

Looksmart - find the appropriate category for your site then click "submit site".

Yahoo - this page explains all. Non-commercial sites may be listed for free.