How Do I Add My Site to Free Search Engines?

The Internet is so huge that even if you looked at a dozen websites a minute for the rest of your life, you wouldn't scratch the surface. There are relevant websites that many people would like to find but can't. This is greatly reduced from the problem it was a few years back because of thorough search engines. If you're not listed in the top search engines, the chances of your website being seen are small. Understanding search engines is important for anyone using the Internet.

Search Engine Basics

Before you worry about submitting your website to search engines, it's important to understand some basics about how they work. Every search engine works a little differently, but they all tend to use formulas to sort through all the websites to bring you the most relevant information. Most search engines go out and look through all of the web and make a database of the information. Search engines that don't crawl the web with computers may search the web manually, but it is almost impossible to have a usable search engine that doesn't go out and find the data because there are so many websites and so much data. Google is the largest search engine, and it crawls the web and sorts the data that is provided to you out of the pages it finds.

Submission Sites

Almost every search engine has a way to submit your site. Submitting to search engines, however, does not mean your site will be included any faster than if you do nothing at all. The best way to get listed is to have a relevant site full of good information to which other sites link. It's still worth taking a little bit of time to submit to search engines because it's free and it doesn't hurt.

Most search engines just have a page where you type in your URL and tell what the page is about. There are also websites that will submit your site to several search engines for you for free. Google's website for adding a page is google.com/addurl (see "Resources" for a link). All you have to do is type in the site address and some comments. SubmitExpress is one of many free search engine submission sites that submits your site to several dozen search engines at once (see "Resources" for a link). Go to this or similar sites and enter your website information and hit "Submit." It will take weeks or months, however, before you see results.

References

• Henry Amon; Information Systems Specialist; Salisbury, Maryland

Resources

• Google.com: Adding Your URL to Google
• SubmitExpress.com: Search Engine Submission