Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Submitting to the Search Sites

You can just sit around and wait for a spider or robot to trip over your site. Sooner or later, that’ll probably happen all by itself — the search engines are always hungry for more sites to add. But being proactive and making certain that your site is listed is a lot smarter. You can submit your site on your own, or you can use services that do it for you.

Doing it yourself

Why bother doing it yourself when you can pay someone else to do it for you? Well, there’s the obvious advantage of saving money. If you’re on a shoestring budget, that can matter. If not, you’re likely going to say something like, “It’s more cost effective for me to pay someone to get my site submitted to search engines than for me to take time away from actually running the business.” Well, there’s something to be said for that reasoning, too.

But there’s nothing like making sure that the job gets done right. And it’s a wise Webmaster who gets thoroughly familiar with the many variations on how the search engines want Web page URLs to be submitted. I strongly recommend that you try submitting to at least a few of them yourself. Table 17-2 gives the URLs of the submission pages for several major search sites.

Table 17-2. Search Site Submission Pages

Submission Page	Web Address
AlltheWeb	www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/submit_site
AltaVista	http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new
Ask.com	http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp
Google	www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo! (commercial sites) ...