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Here is my question: I have been a professional web developer for four years but my previous host did all my search engine submissions for my clients. I am with another host who offers options for submission to a few search engines but little information about how it is accomplished.
My current client will have a very high-line, custom jewelry site with a shopping cart and I want to give him international exposure. At this point, I would be satisfied to just get him submitted to the top search engines and, later, maybe contract with a company to handle his promotions. I hope I might find the opportunity to find someone through your sites.
However, for the moment, I need to get him submitted and I have no clue of how to physically make these submissions. I am going to read everything on your sites to make sure that my meta tags and keywords are set up to my client's best advantage, but I still have no clue of how to actually submit the applications.
Can someone help to point me in the right direction?
Thank you so much for the opportunity to access this wealth of information.
Judi
As for your question - the first step (once you have your metas set up and everything else and you are ready to submit) determine if you are going to submit by hand or use some type of auto submitter. The catch here is that some auto submitters can be dangerous. I recommend the Collective from searchengineworld if you know a little cgi you can have it up and running in no time.
If you are going to go the manual route you simply need to start surfing over to the various engines and directories you want to be listed in. Just hit the 'add url' button and follow the directions.
I also recommend setting up a seperate email address for use in submissions. Many places ask for an email address and then start sending you newsletters or general spam. It is nice if you can direct all this garbage to a separate account and keep your personal inbox clean. A hotmail account will work fine for this if you don't have access to a new pop account.
Well, that is submissions in a very small nutshell. Feel free to ask for any clarification you may need. Good luck.
Thank you so much for the friendly welcome and the good information.
I don't do CGI scripting and I don't know what the "Collective" is, but I will check it out. If I can do something as simple as go to a search engine site and find a place to add the URL, that sure will take some problems out of my mind.
From what I have been reading, there are lots of bad things that happen to people who are stumbling around not knowing what to do. I thought that "Spam" only happened with e-mail, but apparently there are lots of trick that people are using to get ranked at the top of the search engines and they are getting bounced out for "Spamming." If some of this software would get me into that kind of trouble, I would prefer to avoid that and just do it the hard way by hand.
Thank you for telling me how and thank you even more for helping me to avoid the possible pitfalls of getting deluged with e-mail. I will take your advise happily.
Have a great day.
Judi : )
Judi, it's not just the auto-submit software, certain elements of the site itself can get it labeled as spam. AND, being labeled as spam may cause the site to be (more or less permanently) banned from the search engine. This is not meant to make you totally paranoid, but it is best to take your time getting things in order before submitting. Many, many promotional "tips and tricks" are from the Neanderthal era --as with everything else, if it sounds too good to be true, then.....
as for where to go to submit when you are ready, we have a thread on that [webmasterworld.com]
I don't think I have any tricky stuff on the site. It's pretty cut and dried with no hype. It's a customized site which sells custom, high-quality jewelry. I have it set up in frames so the graphics pull up inside the frames and then the graphics are attached to a Miva shopping cart on the back end.
There is very little text except for the individual descriptions of the jewelry. I have a newsletted sketched out but not functional, yet.
I don't know what kind of tricks people use to get them banned, but what I have as content is very straight forward.
I am anxious to make sure that I don't innocently step on a landmine and I will read whatever valid information I can find, which I think is very reliably on this site..and I thank you very much for leaving me a thread to help me.
Our profession certainly has gotten more and more complicated, hasn't it???
Thanks so much.
Judi : )
As we all know, no client can even begin to understand how much work is involved in creating a virtual store. Nor do they understand the gigantic set of skills and the depth and bredth of what we have to know...and keep learning.
I am also a desktop publisher. Once I was struggling with some really bad art work for a graphic artist (who could not even turn on a computer) and she was pacing behind me and finally leaned over my shoulder and said, "Can't you just push a button?" Voila!
I guess if my name were Samantha, I could just twitch my nose.
Thanks for the wonderful support.
Judi : )
