e-Marketing Today

There are two ways to retrieve visitor data about for your Web site. The first is to read the server visitor logs and the second is to use a real-time visitor tracking system.

The difference between them is as follows.

Log analyzers

When someone requests a Web page from a server it records this request in its raw visit logs. A typical server log record looks like this:

127.0.0.1 - frank [ 10/Oct/2000 : 13:55:36 -0700] ” GET /apache_pb.gif HTTP/1.0″ 200 2326 “http://www.example.com/start.html” “Mozilla/4.08 [en] (Win98; I ;Nav)”

The following is an example of the kind of information contained in a visitor record: a request for a document from the IP address “127.0.0.1″; if the document requested is protected through HTTP authentication (as in our case), we will see the User ID under which the user has passed the authentication process (here we see that the user has authenticated as “frank“); date and time of his visit; the HTTP request sent by his browser (here, the browser wants to GET the image “apache_pb.gif” from the server root directory); whether or not his request has been successful (200 is the HTTP response code returned by the server, it means the request was successful); the size of the content forwarded in response to the request – in our case, the image file is 2326 bytes long; referrer (where this visitor has come from – most probably, a Web page that links to or contains the file “apache_pb.gif“); and, finally, user agent, most typically, the browser used by the visitor.

You may think that the server access log contains lots of useful information, and it does. Many programs, called “log analyzers“, are able to parse server logs and display the information it contains in a user-friendly form. One of the most widespread log analyzers is webalizer (http://www.webalizer.com/). It comes as a bundle with many hosting service packages to provide Web site owners with comprehensive statistics of user visits.

However, if we take a deeper look, the records in the server access log do not provide enough information to be truly useful for your marketing. They cannot give you detailed and distinctive information about repeated and unique visits, transaction cycle time, details of visitor’s browser, screen and operating system, effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, keywords and referrers, etc. Even if it’s possible to extract this information from a server log, it requires very sophisticated log analysis software and a great deal of time spent on integration and organization.

Moreover, for certain reasons, server logs do not often provide information with the precision we want. The main reasons are as follows:

1. Visits made by a person who uses a dynamic IP address (e.g. accesses the Internet via dial-up) will be recorded as made by several visitors.
2. Visits made through a corporate network with only one external IP address will count as made by one unique visitor.
3. If a page hasn’t finished (or hasn’t even started) loading into the user’s browser, the server writes this visit to log as soon as it has sent back the request header. However, the visitor may have not seen this page at all.

For these and several other reasons, we want a more improved system of tracking visits. We need a real-time visitor tracking system like HitLens.

Real-time visitor tracking

Most Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, are able to execute browser-side scripts. That is, when you compose a Web page, you can embed program code that will tell the browser not only to show the page on statically on the screen, but to simultaneously perform certain other actions as well.

As a rule, these scripts (written in JavaScript or VBScript) are used to create on-page animation, rollover effects, menu effects, etc. Also, they can be used to process data entered by the user into a form.

HitLens utilizes another purpose of browser-side scripts: that of reporting various data about visitor page views to a remote database, and thus becomes a perfect tool for collecting marketing statistics.

When someone opens a Web page in their browser, the browser executes the tracking JavaScript embedded into the page. The script contains commands to send every possible piece of information about the visitor to the tracking center. Certainly, it cannot report highly personal data like the visitor’s name or sex. What it can report is visitor’s screen resolution details, operating system and browser details, cookie information (if available), time zone, referrer, name of the page viewed and so on, as well as the information embedded directly into the script at design time.

This process remains invisible to the Web surfer viewing the page. The data passed to the tracking center are stored in the database, and when you request the statistics for your site, it is organized into the necessary report and delivered to your computer by HitLens.

This kind of reporting is able to provide a lot more information than simple server logs because the data is gathered directly at the time of visit and immediately at the visitor’s computer. This is also the reason why this kind of tracking is called “real-time” tracking.

To implement this kind of tracking, you must have access to the source code of your pages, since you need to embed the tracking script into them. You should also have privileges to upload files to your hosting server. There aren’t any more technical requirements.

Here’s how real-time tracking compares to log analysis:

HitLens is one of the industry-leading solutions for real-time browser-side visitor tracking. In the next few lessons you will find out how to set up HitLens statistics for your Web site(s).

What you should remember

1. There are two main ways to analyze traffic, one is by parsing server access logs and the second is by embedding tracking scripts into the pages themselves. Special software exists to simplify both techniques/
2. Real-time visitor tracking with the help of a tracking script helps you gather more precise and valuable marketing information than the analysis of server access logs.

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As we learned in the introductory lesson, link popularity is made up by the quality and quantity of inbound links. Another concept to always keep in mind is keyword theme, made up by all words and phrases used in the anchor texts of all links that a search engine can detect pointing to your site from other domains. The closer your keyword theme mirrors the keyword optimization profile you used when optimizing your pages, the better off your SEO efforts will be. A comprehensive keyword theme is the heart of overall inbound link quality, which, in turn, is at the core of a strong link popularity factor.Link popularity is one of the single most influential factors for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings.

In the past a Web page’s ranking was determined mainly by the number of keyword occurrences within “on-page” elements like page text, META tags, title tag etc, Web developers soon learned that they could trick a search engine and make it return their web pages on search engine results by stuffing their pages with keywords. The search engines had to find a way to take the control away from spammers. So they started to give more and more weight to the elements out of direct control of the web page creator i.e. “off-the-page” factors. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore a more quality resource.

In response, Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their sites. One of them are the link farms that we mentioned in a previous lesson. Link farms are pages that contain nothing more than a collection of links. So the search engines gradually shifted away from estimating the link quality and started to assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a Web site. Now Web sites that have a higher number of high quality links are looked upon favorably by the search engines.

Link quality consists of the following factors:

• Page Rank of the site providing the inbound link
• Relevance of the content of the linking site to the content of your site
• Relevance of words used in the anchor text of the links to the content of your page that the link points to
• Number of other links on the linking page. The lower this number, the more valuable the link is

Links pointing to your site from a low ranking, low traffic and unrelated website are nearly worthless.

This lesson deals with four main types of links: inbound links, outbound links, reciprocal links (alternatively called “backlinks” for our purposes, although in some sources these two terms denote different concepts) and, finally, one-way links.

Inbound links are links that originate from an outside web site (domain) . Outbound links are links from your pages pointing to a page on an outside domain. Reciprocal links are when both your page and a page on other site link to each other. IMPORTANT: the links are considered reciprocal if they bind pages, not sites. The links on the following picture are not reciprocal:

Finally, one-way links are when either Site 1 links to Site 2 OR Site 2 links to Site 1 but does not receive a reciprocal link (backlink) from the same page it links to. The links on the picture above are one-way links.

The type of links which have the most influence on your link popularity are inbound one-way links. Sometimes it is assumed that outbound links might decrease a Web site’s link popularity. This is wrong. While outbound links do nothing to increase your link popularity, you do not give away any link popularity when you link to another site.

Due to common misuse of the terms “link popularity“, “site” and “page” it is often thought that a Web site has a single link popularity figure associated with it.for the entire domain. This is incorrect: each page of your site has its own link popularity and keyword theme.

On the second picture, the link BX adds to link popularity of site 2 (page X) and the link CY adds to link popularity of site 1 (page C).

Reciprocal links can add to your link popularity if the Web site that you exchange links with has a higher link popularity than your site. However, reciprocal links are not as powerful as inbound one-way links, because the search engines assume such links are produced in an artificial manner as a result of link exchange.

Methods and techniques of building a link popularity

You should now understand that the best way to build link popularity is by finding sources of inbound, one-way high quality links. This can be achieved in a number of different acceptable ways.

Directories

Directories are categorized listings of links from around the web . There is a great variety of directories on the web, and though only a few main directories can directly influence your inclusion and ranking in the search engines, almost any directory is good for increasing your link popularity. They provide a great source of quality inbound, one-way links because you do not need to link back to a directory once included in its index, and many directories are considered expert sites when “casting a vote” for your site. Be careful not to confuse directories with Free-For-All link pages that are of little value. Free-For-All pages usually never decline your submission, although they say they may speak of the possibility. Getting listed in valuable human-edited directories will take more time, if the directory has a paid inclusion option, this process may be expedited. Getting listed in quality directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo can be more beneficial for your link popularity than a lot of links from smaller, newer directories.

Site content and emailing web site owners

The traditional and the most powerful way to get inbound, one-way links is to have great site content that other web sites will want to link to. Unfortunately, you have no control over how soon and how many other webmasters will find your resource and link to it. You can always send emails to webmasters of similar sites with a simple invitation to visit website. Of course, webmasters have no obligation to review your site or provide an inbound link, nor are you obligated to link back to their site, even if they do provide a link.

This allows you to get links from sites other than directories, which can definitely be better. It is very important to remember that most of the top ranked sites got there because of the valuable content within, thus persuading a large number of other resources to link to them. Writing interesting and informative articles for your web site is a good way of getting these kinds of links.

A strategy for finding potential link partners is to look at who is linking back to your competitors. If these links are from independent Web resources, they can probably post a link to you as well. You can look for pages linking to a certain domain by entering queries using a special syntax in the search boxes of the search engines. For instance, a Google query would look like:

link:www.yourcompetitor.com

This query will list all the sites found in Google’s index that link to www.yourcompetitor.com.

Run the “Who links to me” report on your competitor’s site to see who links to your competitor. Then contact the webmasters of those resources, if you consider it appropriate. Remember no one is obliged to link to you and the only thing you should say in your message is the suggestion that they consider the possibility of linking to your site as a valuable resource for their visitors.

To evaluate each potential link partner, you can use the Google toolbar in combination with the Alexa toolbar. Visit the potential link partner’s site with these two toolbars installed and look at the figures they display. The Google toolbar gives you information about the Page Rank of the site (although you shouldn’t entirely base your decision on this) and the Alexa toolbar will tell you what kind of traffic the potential link partner has. As you remember from the previous lesson, Alexa traffic rank is a reverse indication: the closer to 1 the Alexa Rank is, the more traffic this site receives. However, the graphical presentation works the same way as the Google toolbar: the longer the blue strip, the more traffic. There’s not much sense in getting a link from a low traffic Web site, especially if it has Page Rank lower than 3. By finding out the page rank you will know how much value Google puts into that link.

What not to do

• Do not add your link to a large link list that many webmasters keep on their website and that consists of links only. Actually if a link list consists of more than 30 links, this is considered a link farm. Important search engines like Google recognize it and don’t count these as inbound links. In fact, your rankings can be even damaged as a result.
• Do not decide whether you will link to a website just because of its Google Page Rank. Linking to sites with a high Page Rank means nothing for your own rank; however, if it is a professional resource with valuable content for your visitors, you should definitely link to it!

What you should remember from this article

1. The best and most effective way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your web site’s link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from quality sites such as directories. To get the best quality inbound one-way links, your site needs to provide valuable content, then request a link from similar sites to yours.
2. Increasing link popularity is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Even so, it is definitely worth the time and effort when you see a dramatic increase in traffic.

When you use rank monitoring software, it checks your positions in the search engine result pages just the same way you would do it manually: it sends a query to the search engine via HTTP, usually this query is a simple URL containing the keywords you check rankings for. The search engine then returns a result page, just as it would to your browser. The rank monitoring software parses this result page and picks out URLs of results. If it finds your page among them, it reports the position at which your page was found. If it doesn’t, it requests the next result page from the search engine and reads it, and so on – until it either finds your page or reaches some limit established for the ranking check session.Unlike manual ranking check that would take a huge amount of time (imagine querying the search engines for at least three keywords then browsing 10 result pages for each keyword, picking out for pages of your site, then calculating the position for each of them for every keyword and putting the data into table). Rank monitoring software can facilitate and speed up the process by doing it all automatically.

However, the automated ranking check has some hidden drawbacks.

Once it becomes a common optimization practice to query search engines for many keywords per ranking session, it can produce a significant load on search engine traffic. For this reason, all search engines denounce the automated ranking check. Their programmers have developed a number of techniques to protect themselves against overloading their servers from automatic queries. If the software running on the search engine detects you’ve been sending automatic queries of any type to its database, the most probable penalty assessed will be that access from your IP address to this search engine will be blocked. In other words, if a search engine finds out you’re checking rankings automatically, you will not be able to send any more queries, neither automatically nor manually, to that search engine.

As a rule, this penalty is temporary and lasts only for a certain period, e.g. for one day. However, this can be quite frustrating and can stand in the way of your optimization plans. Besides, if you are sharing your IP with other people they would also be banned from using the search engine. This can happen if you’re inside a corporate network that accesses the internet behind a common firewall or proxy server.

The the answer to this problem is to use software that intelligently emulates human behavior, so that it is impossible for the search engine to differentiate between this software and a real human searching for something in a browser. Such software will comply with the following requirements:

1. Making pauses between querying for separate result pages: A human Web surfer won’t ask for the second result page a moment after he has received the first one; the search engine assumes the searcher needs some time to look through the results.
2. Making pauses between separate requests sent to the search engine: You won’t ask for a keyword the same second you asked for another one, as an automated ranking checker is likely to do.
3. Imitating real browser behavior by fetching images, styles, scripts and logos from search engine result pages: Most browsers, such as Internet Explorer, request these objects embedded into the SERP together with the result page itself. An automated ranking checker may not do this. Enabling ranking checker to fetch images and other page-related information decreases the speed of the ranking check, yet it enhances the chance that you won’t be banned.
4. Visiting search engine home pages: As a rule, automated ranking checkers will not visit a search engine’s home pages – they will start right away with sending a direct query URL like

“http://www.google.com/search?q=sports+wear&sourceid=navclient&start=0&ie=utf-8oe=utf-8″

However, Web surfers do not type these URLs in the address bars of their browsers to perform the search; instead, they go to the search engine’s home page and type their query in the search box; only after that does the browser generate the query string shown above and sends it to the search engine. Thus, search engines would detect sessions that start in a strange manner and ban the IP addresses that initiate such sessions.

1. Following redirects: Some search engines, like Yahoo!, will give special redirect URLs instead of directly linking to the URLs of the result pages found for your query. The purpose of these redirects is to track your clicks, which helps Yahoo! with result ranking. An example of Yahoo’s search result URL looks as follows:

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=search+tool/v=2/SID=e/TID=F497_109/l=WS1/R=3/IPC=ua/SHE=0 /H=3/SIG=116trk9kp/EXP=1114438203/*-http%3A//search.com/

However, most ranking check software would extract direct result page URLs from Yahoo’s redirect URLs and never follow the redirect URLs themselves. This behavior may seem suspicious to Yahoo! and could result in an IP ban.

Ranking Checker software allows you to adjust human emulation by going to File > Settings, selecting the “SE Requests” tab and going to the “human emulation” section. Here you can tune the exact parameters of requests to search engines so that Ranking Checker software is indistinguishable to the search engines from a real human browsing result pages in Internet Explorer (or another browser you set as user-agent in the appropriate section). It may also be useful to give a couple of proxy server URLs to use so that the ranking check requests will always come to the search engine from different IP addresses.

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If you submit manually to a search engine, it’s clear whether your submission has been accepted: most commonly, you will be shown a message confirming that your page has been queued for crawling, or an error message explaining why it hasn’t.

If you are submitting to the crawler based engines with the auto-submission software, sometimes - like in the case of Seo Software - it will give you the opportunity to see the submission result in the report (something like ‘OK’ or ‘Failed’) and the real response pages returned by the search engine as well.

With directories like Yahoo!, when using paid submission, you will receive a message from the editor with an explanation of why your submission has been accepted or rejected.

But dynamic Search Marketing requires you staying updated not only on whether your submission has been queued – it is also extremely important to find out at once when your site has been crawled and indexed and thus found its worthy place in the search engine index. Also, if the site does not appear in the index after a period of time, something must be done. In any case, you need to know when your site has been indexed.

Here are some techniques for verifying if your submission has been successful.

First, even before you submit, try to include a special unique word or combination of words into the page you are going to submit. The idea is that your page will be matched against this word by the search engine when queried for this term.

For this purpose we may use a randomly generated alphanumeric string like “249ej38eh234ieb32i40ly5u05” or a real word combination which is unlikely to be found on any other page on the web, i.e. “International red widgets online open the ranking contest“. Include it somewhere on your page so that it can be read by a search engine spider. Don’t worry, as soon as you determine you’re in, you can immediately remove this from your page.

When you are included in the index, your page will be shown in the result list for this query and – as it’s a unique search term not used by anyone else – your page will appear on the top of the list.

It’s simply about regular checking with the search engine by querying it for this term and looking for your page in the first results. If your page isn’t there, it means you aren’t included in the index yet.

You can make your life easier by using a combination of Seo Software Ranking Checker and Scheduler to automatically and periodically perform this check for you. Once it detects you are found among the results, it means your page has been included into the index and you may celebrate your first SEO victory.

Currently, for any site that does not use spamming techniques, there is no problem getting listed for free in Google, Yahoo and other major search engines. Your site will simply be crawled by their bots and automatically indexed in about two weeks time. However, if you want to be absolutely sure that all pages of your site are quickly indexed, you might want to submit your site to pay-for-performance search engines. If you do, you should decide on two important components of the paid submission process:

• Paid submission budget
• Order of submission to pay-for-performance search engines

Paid Submission Budget

Paid submission is not cheap (at least for an average site owner). Therefore, it is not be wise to begin the process without first thinking about your budget constraints.

The minimum budget is $299 for a one-year listing in Yahoo! human-edited directory (http:///). Being listed in Yahoo! Directory is a sign that you have a good web site (otherwise, human editors would not list you) and search engines pick up on this sign giving you higher rankings. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for sophisticated searchers to search for your site through the directory (and with increasing spamminess of organic results, this trend is likely to become much stronger).

Next, we should factor in some PPC advertising. With proper keyword selection it can be affordable for any site owner. The good thing about PPC is that it protects you from long organic re-indexation periods, and seasonalities by providing a steady stream of traffic. It is advisable to use PPC advertising before you get good organic rankings. After this, the best course of action would be to assess the whole mix of organic and paid search engine traffic, and to implement a wide-ranging search engine marketing strategy. To get started, you will need about $50 for the first month of Google AdWords advertising, and $50 – for Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Therefore, if you decide to get into the field of pay-for-performance search engines, your initial budget should be like this:

Order of Submission

An often-overlooked factor is the order in which you should submit your site to search engines and directories. It is essential, however, to submit your site to directories before submitting to search engines. The point to remember is that search engines give high value to links from directories (assuming that a site is considered worthwhile or even hand-picked to get into a directory) so it is advisable to have some links from directories before submitting to search engines. There can be different orders, but we offer you the following sequence:

1. Yahoo! Search Marketing – http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/– If you are serious about paid submission, Yahoo! is your first and arguably most important stop. Yahoo offers several pay-for-performance solutions, with Search Submit and Directory Submit being the major one. Yahoo! Directory Submit costs $299 and gives you a yearlong listing in the directory (after approving your site). Yahoo! Search Submit incorporates numerous paid submissions acquired by Yahoo (Overture Site Match, Altavista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi) and ensures your submission to Yahoo! and all of its partners, re-indexes your content every 2 days, and gives you a daily report about the performance of your organic keywords. Search Submit costs $49 for the first site; if you add more sites, the price will be lower.
2. Vertical Search Engines and Directories – Some people say that the vertical search engines are the future of the search industry. Search Engine Guide has an excellent listing of vertical engines and directories in different focus areas (http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html). Submission to vertical search engines is often paid, that’s why we mention them in this section. However, you might find a lot of verticals that offer free submission. Also, see if there are any yellow page directories that might be appropriate for you – such as regional directories, or even yellow page directories in your focus area (such as a restaurant yellow pages directory).
3. Pay-per-click Advertising – this is an essential element of a pay-for-performance strategy. The two dominant players are Google AdWords(http://adwords.google.com/) and Yahoo! Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/). Obviously, costs-per-click vary with different keywords and sectors, but $50/mo for each and careful keyword selection will be enough to give you a good start. Another PPC advertising provider you might be interested in is LookSmart with its Small Business Listings program (http://listings.looksmart.com/). With LookSmart you pay flat $0.15 cost-per-click (no auction-style bidding); the price increases if you get more than 5000 clicks and the exact increase is based on your product’s category. LookSmart results feed Lycos, Mamma, and CNet search.
4. Submit Search Engines – after getting some foothold, link popularity, and steady traffic with paid search, you should submit your site to regular search engines using Seo Software.

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There are hundreds of directories on the Web that cover every possible market, offering you valuable opportunities to get your site listed in the crawler-based engines, expose your site to your audience and increase the absolute value of your pages (also known as Google Page Rank). The first (and, if you succeed, maybe the only) directories to get listed in are the Yahoo and DMOZ.

There are other directories such as JoeAnt which can be quite useful also, however, many of them are just not worth the trouble. There’s a worthy technique to determine if the directory can help you on your way to top rankings and traffic. When you are considering placement in a directory, check it’s “robots.txt” file (which we’ve covered in the previous section about optimizing the site structure) and look if it allows the major search engines to crawl it. If they don’t allow crawlers to go through their directory, it will is useless for you to get listed.

As you remember, the robots.txt file is always in the root directory so just type the full URL of the site and add “/robots.txt” on the end to see the file.

When submitting to the directories, remember that they are search engines powered by humans. All listings within the directories are compiled by human editors. You already know how important a listing in a directory can be; please find time to make some recommended preparations for directory submission. This includes writing a 25 word or less description of your entire web site, which includes the use of the primary keyphrase you’ve optimized your home page for. Look that the description you write doesn’t misuse marketing language or hype.

Submitting To Yahoo

Being listed in theYahoo! Directory can potentially help you get included and rank better in crawler-based results, including not only Yahoo’s but also Google’s and MSN ’s.

The Yahoo! Directory allows you to submit in two ways: “Standard” which is free, and “Yahoo Directory Submit”, which involves a submission fee and annual fee of $299 ($600 if your site is adult-related) but guarantees your site will be reviewed by an editor within 7 days. However, it does not guarantee your inclusion and the fee is non-refundable.

To choose from the submission options, go to http://dir.yahoo.com/, choose the appropriate category and then click the “suggest a site” link in the top right section.

Anyone can use Standard submission to submit for free to a non-commercial category. You’ll know the category is non-commercial because if you try to submit to a non-commercial category, the Standard submission option will be offered in addition to the Yahoo Express paid option, discussed further below.

If you choose the free submit, there’s no guarantee that your submission will be reviewed quickly or reviewed at all.

You can have a commerce site and still try to submit for free to a non-commercial category, however you will use caution when submitting. Let’s say you sell weather forecast software. If you submit your site as such, chances are good it will not be accepted; but, if you highlight a page that tells interesting facts about weather and weather forecasting, this information can be considered a good reason to list your site in a non-commercial category.

If accepted into a commercial category for money, you’ll be reevaluated after a year and charged the submission fee again, if you want to stay in Yahoo’s commercial area. You should review the traffic you received from Yahoo over the past year to decide if it is worth paying the fee again. If not, you can decline to be listed again and you will not be charged. Most often, you will decide to drop your listing after a year, for the category itself does not bring much traffic. Remember that the directory listing is initially important for us as a doorway to a Google listing. Once we’ve done that, we may safely let the directory listing drop, most often without a significant impact on the search traffic the site receives. The crawler-based engines will keep revisiting and listing your site on their regular basis.

Remember the more carefully you prepare, research keywords, debug pages, write valuable content and compile your description, the more chances there are to be included, no matter if you’re using the Yahoo! Directory Submit or the Free Submission service.

Submitting To DMOZ

DMOZ / ODP is a catalog of the World Wide Web compiled by volunteers. Nowadays GoogleBot still uses DMOZ as the starting page for its regular crawls, although the DMOZ results are no longer shown in Google’s SERP, as they were earlier.

Submission to DMOZ is free but on the other hand there’s no guaranteed turnaround time for acceptance.

To suggest your site to DMOZ, go to http://www.dmoz.org/ and locate the category you want to be listed in. Then use the “suggest URL” link that is visible on the top of the category page. Fill out the form, and the submission process is complete.

If you are accepted, you should see your site appear within about three to six weeks. If this doesn’t happen, don’t try to resubmit. Instead, try to get your site listed in several regional or thematic categories.

As with Yahoo, it’s highly recommended that you take the time to learn more about the Open Directory before submitting, in order to maximize the amount of traffic you may receive.

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As you already know, crawler-based search engines use software called spiders to regularly surf the Web, find new sites and pages, and add to their index, which is done for free. This means that, unlike directories, you are likely to have several if not many pages listed with them. However, in several cases, discussed in the introduction to this step, you might want to use submission as a safety net against your site being forgotten by the search engine. So, here we give you the guidelines for submitting to the two major crawler-based engines which are sufficient in getting you the desired amount of search traffic: Google and Yahoo!Submitting To Google

Google’s Web submission interface is currently located at: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Google is one of the most important crawler-based search engines because over 70% of Web searches are made through its portal. Besides, it feeds the search results into several other widespread and prominent search services (you might want to review Step 2 – relationships between the search engines to get refreshed on that topic).

The good thing is that if you submitted your site to the major directories (like DMOZ and Yahoo!) and got listed with one of them, Google and other crawlers are guaranteed to pick up that URL. This means you may not need to do additional work to get listed with crawlers.

However, Google still provides an “Add URL” page that lets you submit an URL directly to its crawler. Again, there’s no guarantee that Google will actually include the submitted URL to its database after your submission; on the other hand, chances are that it will. Despite this, it makes sense to submit your home page and perhaps one or two other URLs residing within your domain with the help of the “Add URL” page.

You really don’t need to submit more than this. The only reason for submitting some of your inside pages is in case there is a problem reaching your home page. This gives Google an alternate route into your site. From whatever page it visits, it will look for links to other pages that you have and perhaps include those. This is true for other crawlers, as well.

If you have a brand new web site, it will probably take about a month before Google lists your web pages. Because of this, you might consider making use of its paid placement program.

Submitting To Yahoo

Yahoo!, aside from being one of the largest directories on the net, is an important crawler-based search engine used by many people from all around the world through its regional branches. It provides the main results for several other services (feel free to have a look back into the step 2 – relationships between the search engines).

As with Google, building links is the best way to get listed for free. Yahoo! also offers a free URL submission plan which does not guarantee you will be listed at all, though most probably you will. Submit according to the same instructions as for Google.

If you don’t get picked up for free, Yahoo has affordable paid inclusion programs that guarantee to quickly add the pages you submit. The drawback is that the most affordable paid listing program Yahoo offers includes a pay-per-click feature which means you’ll be charged every time someone clicks on your listing. If you run out of money, your listing may be dropped. However, there’s still a good chance that even if you do run out of money, you’ll continue to be listed for free.

By the way, Yahoo’s crawler incorporates technology from three different crawlers that it purchased in 2002 and 2003: Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST ’s AllTheWeb. Any references you hear about those crawlers are now superceded by the single Yahoo crawler. So your successful submission to Yahoo! Web Search will get you listed into these other engines as well, if you are lucky enough to get into the index.