Registering
The question we always get asked is how can people get on the search engines and nine out of ten times people mistakenly think that simply by registering their site and keeping registering their site they will get a good response. This simply isn't so. Of course you need to be on a search engine in order to be found but once you are there, provided you don't infringe some rule of the search engine and you keep your pages up to date, fast loading and always available it is unlikely that your main concern will be whether you are still on the engine.

There are many adverts for registering of your site with x thousand search
engines a week but how many search engines can you name? It would be fair bet that you will come up with the following list (give or take a few) -
Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Altavista, Lycos, Ask, Google, Hotbot.

Given this fact, it is easy to see that you are naturally less likely to visit any of the others that form the bulk of what these registration companies claim to be thousands of search engines. In fact there are really around twenty top search engines that you need to worry about and the rest should gradually fall into place over time. Many of the other engines either have much lower traffic and should be lower down your list of priorities or else will gradually take on the databases of the other search engines, so if you concentrate on the larger ones, you will find yourself in many of the other search engines also.

How many of you spotted some of the other important ones that I missed?

DMOZ, The Open Directory Project have a small percentage of Internet traffic but its results are extremely important in weighting the answers of many other engines (because it is hand reviewed and free to apply so it is a quality issue as to whether you get in, not a payment one). Looksmart
powers the top answers to many of MSN's results and Inktomi fills in any of the others where Looksmart doesn't provide the answers.

Inktomi serves many search engines with data from its database and so registering with this is very important. You can do so by submitting your
site through Hotbot, however this is not guaranteed. If you want to get
into Inktomi, you can pay to do so (and be on MSN within seventy two hours).

Looksmart does not now appear to give free entry so to be sure you need to pay for inclusion in their directory.

If you purchase inclusion (around £30 for one page), Inktomi is extremely
useful for testing search phrases quickly and finding what actually gets you
to the top of the searches and what produces results (people visiting).

Only when you re ready and finished with your pages start to register with
the directories such as DMOZ.

Although auto registration facilities are useful, hand register with the top 10 or so search engines, do not just use automatic registration (in some cases, such as Altavista you must use a code which they display as a graphic before you enter your site, so it is difficult to see how registration
automatically can possibly be happening!). In my mind, it is too important
to get into the top ten or more search engines to leave this to an automatic
facility.

Your pages complete, and the registration process underway, it will be days, weeks or even months for some search engines to spider (go through) your pages. You can now be looking at how the key words that you have found fit within your pages to produce the best results.

We have a short list of some of the free entry web sites for you to use (please click here). Over the coming weeks we will be adding to this list with details of where to go for the paid inclusion services.

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