Promoting your eBusiness!

If you currently have no marketing plan in place for your website, the only way to generate traffic is by customers finding your site through their search engine queries. Make no mistake: three quarters of all web traffic is generated this way. The customers are out there and they are looking for your product or service. But it is up to you to display your “Open for Business” sign in the window by getting listed on as many quality search engines as possible.

Below is a list of the most popular search engines which offer free site submissions. To submit your website for indexing, click one of the search engines below. When you are there, look for a link called “submit a site” or “add a URL”. Then enter your site information as required.

Beware of Gimmicks!

Be careful about the “free” submission services that promise to send your site to the “Top 1000 Search Engines!” This is often a scam designed to get your email address and sell it to spammers. What you get is junk mail but no search engine listing.

In reality, those “Top 1000 Search Engines” get their listings from a few larger search engines listed below, so if you get your website indexed by “the big few”, your site’s listing is sure to propagate to many of the smaller search engines.

When to Submit Your Site

For search engines, all we can say is “Submit, Submit, Submit”! Although search engines do not guarantee your site will be indexed upon your first submission, be patient! Your site will eventually get spidered by their robot and listed. If you do not find your site within the various “inclusion timelines” listed above, submit your site again – it usually takes two or three submission before you see any results. Be sure not to submit too often or your site will be dropped from the index.

Web Directories are a different kind of animal altogether. They are edited and updated by real flesh and blood human beings. Because of the volume of submissions they receive every day, it takes considerably longer for your site to show up in web directories. Also, it is not necessary to submit your website to all web directories on the net. That’s because many of them extract their information from a small group of central directories. For example, the Open Directory Project powers the core directory services for popular search engines and portals such as Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.