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Cheap Search Engine Promotion
By Robin Miller, Andover News Columnist

How many Cheap Computing readers have their own
websites? Wow! A lot of hands went up. And I bet a lot
of you read Rod's "Working the Web" column yesterday,
in which he talked about preparing your website for
search engine and directory listing by using effective
meta tags. Today we'll talk about cheap -- and free --
ways to get your website listed in search engines and
directories so that hordes of eager websurfers can take
advantage of all the work you've put into preparing your
site for their visits.

The following 15 search engines and directories are
essential to any concerted online promotion effort:
AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, AOL NetFind, Excite, Go,
Google, HotBot, Looksmart, Lycos, Netscape
NetCenter, PlanetSearch, Snap, Starting Point,
Webcrawler, and Yahoo.

The URLs to which I've linked here are the search
engines' actual "Add URL" or "How to Submit" pages. If
you open each of them in a separate browser window
instead of as a "straight" link, you can submit your URL
more rapidly than you could by going to one at a time.
While one submission is being accepted, you can return
here, open a new browser window on another site, and
and start that submission before the first one is
finished.

If you are a fast typist (or type your URL and e-mail
address once into a text editor, then copy them into
the apropriate forms instead of retyping them each time)
you should be able to submit to 10 of the above search
engines in less than an hour. Yahoo, Snap, Netscape,
Planet Search, and Ask Jeeves will take more work -- up
to 30 minutes each -- but they're well worth it!

In effect, this column is all the "free online submission
tool" you need. If you followed the site preparation
advice Rod gave you yesterday, and do what I'm telling
you here today, you'll start seeing traffic increases within
a week, and will see more increases for at least six to
eight weeks, all without spending a dime.

Submission Services and Software
I do not recommend the use of "paid" automated
online submission services. I have tested 18 of them
over the last year, at prices ranging from $10 per URL
submission up to $99 per URL, and none of them did
anything for me that I couldn't do on my own, almost as
rapidly, once I had all the major search engines'
submission pages bookmarked.

Submission software is generally a better value than
online submission services, especially if you plan to
submit multiple URLs to many search engines and
directories more than once.

But you don't need to download and try dozens of
website submission programs. I've already done it -- and
I found that there are basically only three pieces of
credible submission software available: SubmitWolf,
Exploit Submission Wizard, and AddWeb. All the others
I've seen are nothing but repackaged versions of these,
and after trying all three, I decided AddWeb offered the
best value.

My wife, Debbie, does online search engine and
directory promotion professionally for over 30 popular
URLs, some of which change their content daily, so she
uses the highly-customizable, full-featured AddWeb
"pro" version, which costs $149 to register.

But if you have 10 or fewer URLs, and their content
changes less than once a week, the AddWeb
"standard" version, which costs $59 to register, will
probably do all you need.

You can learn more about AddWeb, and download a
free (but heavily crippled) trial version, here.

A Warning and a Few Tips
If you use AddWeb, or any other software, to submit
your URL to hundreds of minor directories and "free for
all links" pages, use a separate, throwaway e-mail
address, not your real one. Many of these sites are run
by MLM and other get-rich people who use your
submission as a way to get your e-mail address so they
can spam you.

Debbie submits URLs to these sites only because
some of the major search engines use "link popularity"
as a ranking factor. This tactic is only useful if you
measure pageviews in hundreds of thousands. For
specialized, low-volume websites, and personal home
pages, it's generally more trouble than it's worth.

Debbie gets most of her in-depth information on search
engine promotion tactics from Search Engine Watch.
There's a $44 annual subscription fee for some of the
site's features, but it's well worth paying for any
large-scale, promotion-oriented website owner.

But if you only have one website, hand-submitting its
URL to the biggest search engines, which costs
nothing, is all the promotion effort you probably need.

Even webmasters with high traffic aspirations only need
a $44 subscription to Search Engine Watch, and either
the standard ($69) or pro ($149) version of AddWeb.
Any expenditure beyond these two basics will be
wasted, unless you're playing for such high stakes that
you decide to hire a professional web promotion
consultant -- and good promotion consultants charge
far too much to be mentioned in a column called
Cheap Computing.