How to Register a Site With Different Search Engines

Many potential site visitors use a major search engine either as their personal homepage or as a tool or portal where they begin many online tasks--including product searches. These different search engines and their pages are traffic magnets, your task is to make that magnetism work for your site when you register with them and optimize your site.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Website

Determine Where Your Site Should Be Visible

1. Build a list of the best, most frequently used search keywords that will bring customers to your site for the right reasons.
2. Research your web hosting provider traffic logs and other analytic tools to develop lists of search keywords and websites that drive traffic to your site.
3. Familiarize yourself with services such as Wordtracker to help analyze the keywords most likely to drive traffic to your website (see Resources below).

Optimize and Register Your Site

4. Make sure, before you register your site with different search engines or otherwise invite scrutiny that it is rich and logical to the "spiders" and "bots" that will soon be crawling it, by conforming your use of keywords in its titles, content and meta tags.
5. Avoid questionable tactics that get traffic unrelated to your business purpose. Stuffing meta tags with bogus keywords referring to the latest pop star scandal won't sell your widgets and it will hurt your page placement in search rankings.
6. Register your site with Google, Yahoo! and other search engines (see Resources below). Keep track of your page rankings and search placement. Search engines often take several weeks to update and crawl your site even after you register.

Tips & Warnings

• Legitimate businesses spend significant advertising dollars placing keyword based ads into the sidebar areas of search pages. But the search results themselves are much more valuable real estate and it is free. The trick is to show up in the right search results with placement as near the top of the page as possible.
• Don't jump the gun. It may be exciting to see if you can register with the search engines and make your site visible when it is still under construction, but it may be counter-productive. An incomplete site may not lure the different search engine spiders, bots and crawlers needed for high placement.