You spent hours building it. You uploaded it. Now you are staring at a blank browser window wondering why nobody is clicking.
Here is the hard truth: nobody finds your site by accident. Not anymore.
If you want eyes on your pages, you have to drag them there. You have to promote.
This isn’t about luck. It’s about tactics. And the first step is getting indexed.
Registering With Search Engines
Search engines are the gatekeepers. They crawl your pages, read the words, and file them away in their massive databases. When a user types a query, the engine spits out results based on those keywords.
There is a benefit. And a downside.
The benefit is reach. You can be found for specific terms.
The downside is noise. Search engines return a lot of chaff with the wheat. You might rank for “red shoes,” but you’ll also compete with every other shoe seller on the planet.
From a promotion standpoint, the process is surprisingly low-tech. It is easy to get listed. Each engine has a “submit a site” link buried somewhere on their homepage. You click it. You fill out a form. Some forms are short. Some are long.
Do not expect instant gratification. Your site will not appear immediately. Sometimes it takes several submissions over days or weeks to show up. Each engine operates on its own schedule.
Here is the critical part that most beginners miss: submit each of your pages individually.
Why does this matter? Because the keywords on your homepage are different from the keywords on your “About Us” page or your product page. If you only submit the root URL, you are telling the search engine, “Index this one page, ignore the rest.”
You want the search engine to know what every single page is about. Submit them one by one. Make sure the keywords from each separate page are incorporated into the submission data.
If you are starting from scratch, these are the major engines that matter:
- Alta Vista
- AOL Search
- HotBot
- Lycos
- WebCrawler
Submit to all of them. Or at least the ones that still exist and care.
Registering With Link Sites
Now look at directories.
Link sites list websites in a hierarchical structure. Think of them as digital phonebooks. Your site gets placed in a category with a short description.
Yahoo! is the original example of this. There are many others trying to replicate the model in different ways.
The process here is slower. Much slower.
People must review each submitted site before it goes live. You cannot just click a button and be done. You have to find the right category first. Then you find the “Add URL” button. Then you wait.
These directories are picky. They want quality. They want relevance.
Where should you submit?
- Jayde Online Directory
- LookSmart
- Nerd World
- Northern Light
- Open Directory
- Yahoo!
Find the home pages for these. Browse the categories. If you submit your site to the wrong category, it will be rejected or buried.
This is the foundation. You have the search engines. You have the directories.
But this is just the beginning. The landscape changes. New services appear. Old ones die.
We will look at the different kinds of listing services next. Because just being listed isn’t enough. You have to be found.
And being found is harder than you think.
