To submit your site to the search vehicles that can bring you the targeted traffic you need.
Skills Needed:
· Basic Surfing
· Basic html
· Basic ftp
· Basic Email
Today’s Lesson:
Part 1 – One Last Site Modification
There’s one last modification we need to make to your site before you submit to Yahoo!
You need to come up with a 15-25 word description for your site.
This is relatively simple, but you must do it correctly so you have the best chance at
getting a great listing on Yahoo!
The reason I had you wait until now to do this is I wanted you to get some good practice
at writing short, descriptive paragraphs for your Overture listings -- which prepares you
quite well for what we’re about to do here.
Take your most popular keywords (from your Overture list) and create a description that
incorporates as many of the most popular keywords as possible.
Remember the list:
16806 antique car
1578 antique car for sale
1565 antique car part
871 antique car price
699 antique car show
647 antique car values
In our example we might create a title and description that goes like this:
1Stop Antique Car Show (the name of the business)
Offers antique car show quality and classic parts for sale, discount values on hard to find
models, order parts online. (description)
This description also acts as the “ad” for your Yahoo! listing – so you have to balance the
need to “stuff” your keywords with making it readable and logical for both the category
editor and people searching the web.
Now that you’ve written your description you need to do two things:
Insert the title and description into the meta-tags of the home page of your site.
If you really want to push this description on the Yahoo category editor, you
should also insert the description at or near the top of the visible copy on the
home page in bold type.
You may not think it’s possible to insert this description visibly on the page itself,
especially if you have tweaked your sales copy… but you can always remove the
description once you get into Yahoo. Get it up there at the top if at all possible
because it will help you.
Here’s an example:
This would be the html code at the top of the home page.
NOTE: I know this is slightly different than what we told you on day 7 – but there are
exceptions to every rule. This is strictly to satisfy Yahoo and Dmoz that you are who you
say you are and you actually do what you say.
This might be the top of the visible home page:
1Stop Antique Car Show
Offers antique car show quality and classic parts for sale, discount values on hard to
find models, order parts online.
Antique car show enthusiasts here's the site you've been looking for!
Everything should match!
Once you have made these two changes on the home page, upload it to your site.
Part 2 - Website Checklist
Take the following checklist and go over your website with a fine tooth comb just before
submitting it to Yahoo as well as the other directories and search engines.
" Have you spell-checked the entire website?
" Do all the pages load?
" Do all the links work?
" Do your site name, domain name and domain registration all support the fact that
you should receive a certain name in a specific category?
" Is there anything on the site or in your domain registration that would lead a
Yahoo category editor to believe that your business was named anything else?
" Are your meta-tags in place?
Page 128
? 2004 Surefire Marketing, Inc. & Guaranteed Response Marketing, LLC – All Rights Reserved
www.33DaysToOnlineProfits.com
33 Days to Online Profits – 2004 Edition
" You should go over Yahoo!’s submission guidelines one more time before you go
any further.
Click here to review them ==> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
Part 3 – Submit your site to Yahoo!
Once you’ve gotten the title and description positioned and have gone over the website
checklist -- it’s time to submit to Yahoo.
Go back to your notes on Day 1 when you chose your Yahoo category and return to that
specific category page in Yahoo.
Look through that category again at the various websites listed.
Does it still make sense that you should list in this category? (If not, find one that does
make sense.)
How does your title and description compare with the others?
Would you fit into this category as far as content while standing out as a well positioned
link near the top?
If everything still looks good then let’s move ahead…
Near the top of your Yahoo! category page look for a link that says “Suggest a Site”.
Click that link and, if you are operating a commercial site, you will be taken to a page
that looks like this:
Yahoo charges to review everyone’s commercial site – but the traffic can be worth the
price. For sites submitted after 12/28/01, Yahoo will charge this fee every year.
So you click the “Yahoo! Express” button and they guide you through the terms of
service.
You have to click that you understand each item on the list, including that you understand
Yahoo! doesn’t guarantee to list your site. (They don’t guarantee to list anyone’s site!)
After you sign up for your id and password you can log in.
You will then come to a screen that asks you for the information about your site.
Make sure the category they list at the top matches the one you want for submitting your
site.
Make sure the site title matches your site title, url, business name and registrant.
Insert your web address in the URL.
Copy and paste your 15-25 word description in the Description box. Make sure it
matches the description on your site exactly.
One other note – when it asks for your contact information don’t make the mistake of
using an email from another business website.
Use an email address that reinforces your website identity.
In this case I would use the email info@1stop-antique-car-show.com
I would NOT use an email like sales@onlinecarauction.com because that might make
the Yahoo editor change the name of my submission or cause them to investigate my site!
This just creates needless problems and delays. Even your email should reinforce your
identity and name with the Yahoo editors.
The rest of the submission is pretty straightforward.
You just fill in the blanks where required – just make sure you don’t tell them you are a
local site unless you actually only operate locally.
As you go along Yahoo will get your payment information and then let you know you’ll
hear something from them within a week as to whether or not they’ll include your site in
the directory.
Though we can’t guarantee it (nobody can) - if you have followed everything in this
ebook along with Yahoo!’s actual guidelines, you should have a high likelihood of
achieving a good category listing… and certainly a better listing than if you just tried it
blind!
Part 4 – Submit your site to Dmoz
Submitting to the Open Directory (www.dmoz.com) is actually a lot easier than Yahoo.
Just go back to the Dmoz category you chose on the first day and ask yourself the same
questions as we did with the Yahoo category.
Look through that category again at the various websites listed.
Does it still make sense that you should list in this category?
How does your title and description compare with the others?
If everything still looks good then let’s move ahead…
At the top right of the category page you will see a link that says “add URL”.
Click that link and you will go to the submission page.
Dmoz’s submission process is much simpler… just one page!
They only ask for 4 things:
1. The site URL (http://www.yoursite.com)
2. The site title (copy and paste if from your website)
3. The site description (copy and paste it from your website)
4. Your email address (info@yoursite.com)
Dmoz makes no guarantees about listing your site, however most get listed within 4 to 6
weeks.
If you site doesn’t get listed within 4-6 weeks you should resubmit.
NOTE: If the category you are submitting to doesn’t have an editor you may have to wait
a lot longer because nobody is monitoring that category.
Since anyone can be a category editor, you could apply to be the editor and then be
virtually assured of a great spot if they accept you to edit your own category.
You can tell if a category doesn’t have an editor because at the bottom of the page it says,
“this category needs an editor”.
Part 5 – Submit your site to a few of the “major” search engines
Submitting your site to the search engines doesn’t guarantee anything as far as ranking.
If you want to truly use the search engines to promote your site then you need to either
hire someone or take the time to learn all you can about a subject that changes daily.
We have included some resources for you to investigate below if you are serious about
search engine promotion. They get into a lot more detail than we can here.
Web Position Gold – Web position helps you track your positions on the major search
engines so you can improve them. Excellent product for tracking how you rank.
Search Engine News – publishers of “The UnFair Advantage Book on Winning The
Search Engine Wars” Many people consider this the guide to learning how to manipulate
the search engines and get top placement.
Search Engine Forums – This forum contain a wealth of information about the search
engines and membership is free.
Regardless of whatever degree you decide to get involved with actively promoting to the
search engines, let’s submit the pages you’ve created so far.
www.Google.com - http://www.google.com/addurl.html
www.AltaVista.com - http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new
www.MSN.com - http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
www.alltheweb.com - http://addurl.alltheweb.com/add_url
Summary of Today’s Assignments:
1. Make the title and description modification to your site and upload the changes.
2. Go over the website checklist
3. Submit your site to Yahoo!
4. Submit your site to Dmoz.
5. Submit your site to the major search engines by going to individual search
engines and submitting each page of your site.
Today’s Resources:
Web Position Gold – Web position helps you track your positions on the major search
engines so you can improve them. Excellent product for tracking how you rank.
Search Engine Forums – This forum contain a wealth of information about the search
engines and membership is free.
Search Engine News – publishers of “The UnFair Advantage Book on Winning The
Search Engine Wars” Many people consider this the guide to learning how to manipulate
the search engines and get top placement.
See the featured article on “Achieving a TOP 10 Ranking” on the next page!
Featured Article – Achieving a “Top Ten” Ranking
I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me, “How to do I get my site to come
up in the top ten of the search engines so I can get hits and sell my product?”
What they really want to know is, “How can I get people to show up to my website
without spending any money on advertising my site!”
People usually don’t like my answer because accomplishing a “top ten ranking” on any
search engine always requires careful thought along with a significant amount of work.
Three types of “Search engines” abound on the Internet.
They include true search engines, directories, and links pages.
At last count approximately 10,000 sites referred to themselves as search engines, though
only about a dozen sites rate your attention since they drive 97% of the Internet’s search
traffic.
These sites include:
· Yahoo!
· Lycos
· Excite
· AltaVista
· Northern Light
· HotBot
· WebCrawler
· AOL Netfind
· …and a few others.
When a visitor logs onto a search engine looking for information, they enter “keywords”
about the subject in hopes of obtaining a list of relevant websites.
Each search engine operates with its own rules about judging a site’s relevancy to a
keyword search.
They look at text on the web page (body text) as well as words you can’t see which reside
in the actual code of the web pages.
This code includes such things as alt tags, title tags, description tags, keywords tags and
others.
Depending on the search engine, what you can’t see may represent a far more important
part of ranking well than the words appearing on the page.
Search engines look at how many times a keyword shows up in the various parts of your
website as well as actual location on the page.
Assuming that an important subject for your pages would appear at the beginning of a
page, those web pages starting with the keyword should rank better than those that don’t.
Also, in many cases, the more times the keyword appears (without overdoing it) the
better a page ranks.
Entire books and websites exist to teach eager website owners how to pump up their
rankings on all the various search engines, however these promotion tips will serve you
well in your quest for the “Top Ten!”
· See what others have done for maximum exposure.
Go to the various search engines and perform a search under which you would like to
appear.
Dissect those pages to find the common elements that make them show up high in the
rankings:
o How often and where do the keywords appear on the page?
o How many words on the page in total?
o Do they put keywords in their hypertext links?
o How does the coding in each page seem to relate to the others?
· Beware of registration vs. promotion
Plenty of companies will “register” your website with thousands of search engines for
about $50-$100.
But simply submitting to the search engines won’t do much for you – and besides, you
can submit yourself just as well for FREE!
Without the proper structure in your website, only sheer luck will cause your site to pop
up in the top ten!
Feature Article - Critical Search Engine Mistakes
Sooner or later anyone with a website comes to the startling realization they need that one
essential thing all sites need for online success – traffic!
Website designers and owners usually relegate traffic generation, and specifically search
engine traffic generation, to last item on the to-do list as something they’ll “worry about
later.”
If you own or advertise with a website, the following list of critical search engine
mistakes will do as much to dispel any misconceptions you might have as it will to help
you generate more search engine traffic by either cleaning up your existing site or starting
off fresh with your next one.
1. Targeting the wrong keywords.
Most people don’t give enough thought to the keywords around which they build their
site.
They do little or no research as to the relative popularity of certain terms and they
frequently use industry specific terms consumers would never use in a keyword search.
2. Using “Mirror” sites.
A technique that used to work for achieving better positions in the search engines
revolved around publishing your website in several places on the web and submitting
them all to the search engines.
The major search engines now have duplicate content filters that defeat this technique.
3. Using the same page repeatedly.
Similar to posting mirror sites, using the same page over and over no longer rates as an
effective promotion technique.
4. Endlessly repeating keywords.
Referred to as “keyword stuffing” this technique of repeating keywords in various parts
of a web page only serves to annoy the search engines and rarely results in even mediocre
placement.
5. Stealing other people’s code.
Many so called “experts” tell you to go to the search engines, find a page that ranks well
and take their code. They don’t tell you that the search engine duplicate content filters
can catch you – and ban you!
6. Treating all search engines the same.
Each search engine has its own rules. What works for one won’t always work for others.
7. Treating Yahoo! like a search engine.
Yahoo! is not a search engine. Yahoo! is a directory with its own extremely unique rules
and live human beings making the site classifications.
8. Using most automatic submission tools.
Any program that submits fifty web pages to the same search engine in two minutes
alerts the search engines to a possible “SPAM” submission.
9. Promoting most free web space.
Search engines know that very little valuable or unique content comes from virtual malls
or free web space such as Tripod or Homestead.
They routinely block content from these sites.
Every page on your website can potentially draw visitors. Ensure every page contains the
necessary “search engine friendly” elements including meta-tags and focused content.
This represents just a summary of the mistakes people make promoting to the search
engines.
With consequences ranging from weeks of wasted effort to having your domain banned
from the search engines for life, take the time to educate yourself on the proper methods
of site promotion.
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