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How to Submit Your Site

PFW.com - 2002 1. Select a Search Engine
Aside from promoting your web site using traditional advertising, one of the cheapest and easiest ways to drive traffic to your web site is to list your site with all of the popular search engines. There are literally hundreds of search engines available on the Internet today and, while you probably won't have time to visit each one individually to submit your site, you can at least visit the ones listed to the right.

2. Find the "Submit a Site" Link
Once on the search engine's home page, look for the link called "Submit a Site" or "Recommend a Site" or "Add a URL". Clicking on this link should take you to a page with further information about the engine's indexing policies and allow you to enter your URL and keywords. (In this example, the link you're looking for exists on the second page).

3. Enter your URL and Keywords
On the "submit" page, enter your URL (remember to enter it as a user would -- with the full address -- for example, http://www.ourdealership.com) and keywords in the fields provided. Note that as each "submit" page is different between search sngines, be sure to read each page's instructions carefully!

That's it!

Keywords
Possible keywords you can use include your company name, lines of equipment you carry (such as Kubota, Ingersoll-Rand, Case, etc.), as well as other associated words like: equipment sales, rental, and parts and service.

It's FREE -- (sometimes)
Note that listing your site with a search engine is free - as long as you do it yourself. There are many services that, for a fee (sometimes as much as $200) will register your site with hundreds or thousands of search engines, Web directories, and information portals.

What is a Search Engine?
Search engines utilize indexing software agents often called robots or spiders. These agents are programmed to constantly "crawl" the Web in search of new or updated pages. They will essentially go from URL to URL until they have visited every Web site on the Internet.

When visiting a Web site, an agent will record the full text of every page (home and sub-pages) within the site. It will then continue on to visit all external links. Following these external links is how search engines are able to find your site regardless of whether or not you register your URL with them. Submitting your URL, however, does speed up the process. It notifies an agent to visit and index your site instead of waiting for it to eventually locate you through one of your external links.

Robots will then revisit your site periodically to refresh the recorded information. The revisiting of links is the reason why some search engines don't require you to inform them of dead links. Eventually, their robot would try unsuccessfully to update the information on a dead link and realize it no longer exists.

Finally, an easy way to tell whether a Web index is a search engine as opposed to another type of directory is by the information it requires when adding your URL. A true search engine will only need the Web address. The indexing agent takes care of the rest. (from www.submit-it.com)

And Finally...
If you're still not sure about how to register your web site with Internet search engines, there's lots of information available on the Web (of course!), including more helpful hints about how to incorporate things like HTML "META" tags into your site pages.

Good luck!