The Search Engines, such as Google, are your pathway to get potential visitors to your website. There are right and wrong ways to prepare your website, and then to submit it to these search engines.

Many search engines and directories allow you to submit your website to them for review. It is important not to submit your website until you have prepared it for search engine friendliness. For example, your website may have poor coding, or poor use of words on the visible pages, or was been generated by page-creation software. The first thing you need to do is make sure your page is likely to be ranked high by the search engines, and we can help you with this.

In the past, there were "tricks" that a web designer could utilize in order to fool the search engines into scoring your pages higher than they deserve, mostly through the use of hidden keywords and code. The search engines have become smarter in recent years, and most of these technicques no longer work. However, there are a few important considerations that still get forgotten.

The search engines come visiting your website in search of relevent words, and the first place they look is in the title of your page. Rather than simply naming your business, add a few descriptive words here, it is an ideal method to boost your ranking. The "meta tags" used to be used by search engines, and provide a way to list your keywords and description, but they are generally no longer used in determining ranking. Your description tag will be used to display a description of your website after the search results are displayed, so it does still serve a purpose.

If your web pages have question marks in them, they are likely generated on the fly, or "dynamic". If the page file name ends in .htm, or html, they are likley static. Though dynamic websites are easier to maintain, they do not score well in search engines. Even Google's Webmaster Guidelines recommend making a separate set of static pages if your website is dynamic in nature. I recommend modifying your website so that it can benefit from the static pages, and embed some of the dynamic content into the static pages. This will ensure that most of your content will be found by the Search Engines.

You may have seen free or inexpensive offers to have your website submitted to hundreds or even thousands of search engines. Most of these offers even guarantee that your site will get submitted to these powerful search engines. If you read carefully, you will see that there is no guarentee that any of these submissions will be accepted, and the truth is that automated submissions like these are generally always rejected or ignored. What generally happens is that the people offering this service just want your email address to send to bulk emailers. (in other words, expect a lot more spam!)

The only way your website stands any chance of being accepted into a search engine, is if you manually visit the search engine and look for "Suggest a Site", or some other fine print that brings up a submission form. After submitting the information, be prepared to wait several weeks, sometimes even months, before anything takes place. Some search engines no longer have a site submission area, they simply crawl the web looking for new websites. The only way you can get picked up and ranked high, is to get incoming links from other quality websites. You may be tempted to buy keyword traffic from a search engine, but be careful because some of these "hits" may not be human visitors, and the costs can sometimes get out of control.

Google may take up to a year before they will list your website in their Search Engine, other Search Engines may be a little faster. There is no shortcut, any service offering to "Get your Website into Google in 10 days - Guaranteed", or other such claims, is a hoax. Google does not listen to other marketing companies, nobody can make them get anyone into their directory until they are good and ready, and they feel that longevity is a good indicator of the quality of a website, so the longer your website is out there, and the more links are pointing to it, the better your chances for a higher ranking.

If you would like advice or assistance in getting more search engine traffic to your website, please contact me, and I will provide a plan that may involve linking, re-writing text, or other techniques that will get your website noticed by the all-important search engines.