Back in the early days of the web, it was commonplace to submit your site to thousands upon thousands of search engines. These days, the only major players in the search engine field (which account for over 90% of all searches) are Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. Some companies charge you a fee to list your site on these search engines, but even then, there’s no guarantee you’ll be listed – much less for the niche keywords you want.
So what’s the solution?
You can have the search engines come to you.
This is made possible by the links pointing to your site from other sites. These are called inbound links. Before you go out and tell everyone you know to link to you – you should know that it’s not enough just to have thousands of sites linking to yours.
The quality of your links (often determined by Google PageRank among many other things) also plays a part in getting your site recognized by the search engines.
Smart website owners with a high ranking know this, and you’ll find they’ve usually taken steps to keep their top rank near and dear to themselves. Just asking for a link from a high profile link partner will usually not get a reply.
You can use the link partner template I’ve included in Get Niche Quick to help you swap links with smaller, less “famous” sites – which will still bring you a good deal of traffic if they offer products related to – but not competing with – your niche. Oftentimes these sites are already listed in the search engines, which can help get you listed as well.
Other methods of getting high quality inbound links include:
• Posting regularly on niche-related forums
• Getting listed in web directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo (this is different than the Yahoo search engine).
• Submitting a press release (webwire.com is a recommended resource)
• Offer something amazing for free on your website that people will want to link to and share — could be a free report, chart, software program or something very useful.
• Post on relevant niche blogs – although many blog owners, in taking steps to fight junk comments, ensure that even though the blog asks for your URL, the link doesn’t help your ranking. Still, if you post insightful comments, other readers may want to click and see what your site is all about.
Try out these methods for your new niche website – and be patient! Before long, you’ll not only be listed in the search engines, but you’ll help build recognition of your website with your target audience. As long as you continue to post good, helpful content – the traffic that follows will build gradually and naturally.
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DMOZ can be a tough nut to crack. Is there some sort of trick to it I might be missing out on?
[...] The Right Way to Submit a Site to the Search Engines | Get Niche … [...]
No real tricks – just a matter of submitting to the right subdirectory, having good content and waiting. Since DMOZ is edited by people, it can take months for a listing. My suggestion would be to submit once to DMOZ, then concentrate your efforts on other organic SEO building plans while waiting for it.
I agree. There are a lot of directories where you can submit and all of them takes time so why not submit to all of them.
I stay on basic in this regard, content is king.
It’s not easy that is why I keep on updating it.
Submission is just secondary activity.
Thanks for sharing your ideas.
I agree with Cherice. We have found that submitting once, and carefully filling out the requiered information is best practice.
Thank you so much for mentioning quality links! I do focus on PR, which sometimes has people thinking I am crazy, but I know that you can’t just have anyone linking to you to have it be effective.
The press release I did for my website when I first opened it did wonders for my rankings in a particular keyword. The results were far from instant though, it took a good six months to kick in.
DMOZ seems nearly impossible to get into … and I’m not sure if the yahoo directory is worth paying for … it costs $299 just to have them review your site … imagine paying that and not getting in? Seems like it would be worth it if you have the money to throw away.
I’ve had some luck with social bookmarking software, not for RANKING well, but just for getting pages indexed. I can usually get them indexed within hours of their creation.
I have found it very hard to get listed with DMOZ. I have tried for several years to get my sites listed.
You have some really nice suggestions to get inbound links.
thanks
bJones
Create great content and post it on your website. When you have great content on your website, you entice other webmasters to share your content on their sites by providing a link back to you