Search Engine submission software

"Really good" and "free" are in the case of search engine submission tools probably mutually exclusive. Sure, there are web sites/tools that promise to submit your site to 200 search engines. But if you check what search engines they are submitting to, most of them are so far over the horizon of really useful web sites that they are not worth your time.

There is another dimension to seach engine submission -- the quality of the pages being submitted. If they are not optimized for a particular search engine, getting them submitted to that search engine won't make a bit of difference. They'll be so far off page 1 of the results you might as well not have bothered.

So as far as a "really good" tool, I recommed WebPosition Gold. It is not free but is worth every penny. It'll walk you through building a web page optimized for any of the major domestic or international search engines. It'll upload the page for you to your web site. It'll analyze and compare that page against your competition. It'll submit the page to the seach engine(s) you select. It'll track visits to the web page (with a subscription to www.hitslink.com). The price includes free updates for a year.  

I've used it -- for example, if you search for "bareroot roses", you'll see that www.regannursery.com is among the top 5 on all of the top search engines.  

There is no such thing as a "search engine submission tool" anymore. Most (if not all) major search engine frown on automated submissions because they tend to submit each and every page on the site, when just submitting the index page is already sufficient for the search bot to spider thru the other pages.

Automated submission software are pretty much dead and buried. You're better of submitting to Google once, and watch your hits from search engines grow after about two weeks or so.

You might want to learn more on meta-tags (some people will tell you it's dead, perhaps it is, but it's too simple to ignore it totally), the use of the robots.txt file, and optimizing your .htaccess file.

Try http://www.getsurfers.com/resources

Has free submission, page ranking, links page, dead link checker and banner exchange - ALL FREE



Simon.

G,

Never use automated search engine submission tools for it might hurt your rankings.

pardon

Thanks for the replies.

What if I have a dynamic site using asp/asp.net that contains 1000 products. The details for each product can be found on a details page: details.aspx using a querystring parameter to determine that product to display i.e. details.aspx?ProductID=909

How do I register all this products/pages with a search engine like yahoo.

I am sure the querystring parameter will cause problems.

Thanks,

S

As long as your pages link to these dynamic pages, there shouldn't be any problems. The most popular search engines indexes them properly. If you're using Apache, I can give you some tips on using mod_rewrite to achieve better spidered pages, but you're using IIS instead.

If you want to index dynamic .ASP pages for each product, you have a couple of choices:

- List the .ASP pages for each product and submit them individually. The product pages should be optimized for the product name using keywords that'll draw in customers.

- Create a number of doorway pages on your site that each  contain perhaps about 100 of the links to the product pages above. The product links should be related to one another and contain the name of the product using the keywords you want, as should the product pages themselves.

Automated search engine submission is definitely NOT dead or obsolete, nor does it risk hurting your rankings. That's pure bunk. If you spam the search engine with every page on your site by submitting them all at once, yes, your site will get banned. And you can use free tools, like that which "GetSurfers" above apparently owns and refers you to. But if you look at the list of sites that GetSurfers submits, 99% of them are very small, speciality type lists. And unless your web site is pertinent to the topic of that web index, you're likely to get people coming to your web site for the wrong reasons.

I use WebPosition Gold and submit one page per day for each search engine. It is not free but it does an excellent job. So to answer your original query, "really good" and "free" are not compatible when it comes to search engine submission. You get what you pay for.

Brian

You can't actually get dynamic web pages ranked. What happens is that when the search engine looks for it, it doesn't trigger the dynamic code, same way it can't see flash, read images, or see frames. What you have to do for these is create gateway information pages, in other words, pages that link to the dynamic pages that are attractive to spiders.

Most automatic systems are not worth using 'cause they're often considered spamming. However, signing up with every search engine imaginable is always a good idea since they impove your ranking and are free publicity.

To know which keywords to use, go to overture, they offer to show the # of hits for every keyword and never aim for #1, there's too much competition, rather aim for 30000 hits/month.

Lastly, paid listings are great if you know how to do it. Many of them offer listings for as little as 25cents a hit. You can make your listing so specific that it'll only show up on for someone who wants exactly your product. It's a sale for 25 cents.

good luck
Eric

Almost everything for free is NOT worth it. Junk submissions to 100s or 1000s of second and third tier directories do nothing for your rank on the top destination sites. But, they DO add you to spammers lists.

IMO:

- DMOZ.org - The only free directory worth you time as Google has an interest in it.
- WebPosition Gold will give you some advice to work with.
- Google Adwords Select is good for PPC.
- Gateway pages *can* hurt you with some engines.
- Yahoo express registration is another place


RobA

I am a Search Engine Submission consultant with a company in the UK. We have been running Internet Marketing services for 5 years and have over 200 clients near or at the top of search engines.

DO NOT use auto submission software. Several answers have already been supplied to you with this answer. Listen to them. Google even goes so far as to say:-

"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
From http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

We know this in the industry as "a big no no" ;-)

Hope this helps

bheroniphr -

My recommendation for WebPosition Gold is for it's "Page Critic" feature. For those on a limited budget it's the next thing to an SEO/SES consultant. The regular updates aren't too bad either.

RobA

I agree with Rob on his last point. Certain elements of WebPosition can be used safely, but in reference to the original question:-

"I am looking for a really good search engine submission tool"

don't use it.

Thought I would throw in my 2 cents. Do not use search engine submission software. There are very few major search engines and it only takes a second to submit to them. You only need to enter your base url and everything will be crawled. Most of the other engines either use the results from majors or would not provide any traffic for you, so I would spend time elsewhere. For a list with links of where to submit to major engines see sitepoint thread below:
http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=53874

Also make sure to submit to the major directories.

For the asp pages I would look into using mod_rewrite. For information about this visit sitepoint also:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/485

Another souce for targeting keywords is wordtracker.com.

BTW, Yahoo! owns Inktomi but currently is served by a combination of Overture / Google.  Overture costs money everytime, but Google can be free.  If you submit to dmoz.org, Google learns of new sites added to the directory on a weekly cycle, and Google crawls the Web evey 28 days.

That will give you an idication of how long you have to wait to get into Yahoo! results.  Yahoo! will likely change over to Inktomi from Google in the future.  Search engine marketing is a fast moving and complicated industry!

*cheers*
-detlev