Submitting to Directory Search Engines

In this lesson, we will discuss why submitting to specialty directory search engines is an important part of website marketing, plus give you methods for finding and submitting to these resources.

Instead of offering a submission process, many search engines use spiders to crawl the web to discover new websites. You can increase the odds that these search engine spiders will find your site by getting inbound links from other sources that focus on your specific topic. These inbound links as especially important for getting indexed by Google.

Getting your site listed in niche directory search engines can also improve your search engine rankings by boosting your page rank. Page rank measures a website's reputation based on the quality of its incoming links from other sites. A link from a specialized search engine that focuses on your topic will be seen as more relevant than a link from an unrelated website. The more quality links that you have pointing to your website, the more search engines will regard your website as being important.

Before you submit

Directory search engines that focus on a specific topic are edited and built by real people who want to provide quality search results to their visitors. Therefore, you need to make sure that your website is ready before you ever submit. This means that your site should offer good information, does not have any under construction signs, and that there are not broken links or slow-loading pages.

Preparing to submit

It helps to have your URL, title, description, and any other relevant information written out before you begin the submission process. By composing these in your word processing program, you can make sure that they appear the way that you want, check for any spelling errors, and save it for future use. Here is the information that you will generally need (not all directories require everything):

Website URL - Make sure to use the correct URL for your website. This may seem like common sense, but submitting an incomplete website address may prevent your site from getting listed. Make sure that all components of the URL are present, including the http://, the www, and the right extension (i.e. .com). For example, here is a proper URL: http://www.yourdomain.com.
Website title - This should identify your site (such as your official website name). You can capitalize the first letters of all your nouns, but don't capitalize every word (i.e. words like and, at, on, etc.).
Description - Your description should describe the content of the website concisely and accurately, and should be written so that a visitor will want to click on your listing. Avoid excessive hype and make it professional.
Relevant keywords - List the keywords that most accurately describe your website. Put the most highly searched for terms first.
Company name, your name, address, phone number, and email address (not all of these are required, it just depends on the specific directory search engine that you are submitting to)

How to find niche directory search engines

Here is an easy way to find search engines and directories that relate to your specific topic. Use the Search It tool and follow these steps:

Choose Specialty Hubs and Directories from the drop-down menu in "Step 1".
Choose either Google Wide, Google Tight, Yahoo Wide, Yahoo Tight, SE Guide to Topical Directories, or ISEDB Directory Database under "Step 2".
Type in what your website is about under "Step 3".
Click on the "Search It" button.

This will return the results from your selected search. I suggest doing this search for each of the options on step 2. When you look at the results, you want to choose directories that have a high page rank and are very relevant to your industry. A link from such a site will be given more weight by the major search engines.

If you don't know how to find the page rank for a website, the easiest way is to install the Google toolbar. Unfortunately, the Google toolbar only works with Internet Explorer. If you don't want to install the toolbar on your browser, you can check the page rank for various websites here.

How to submit to the directory search engines

Find the correct category - Browse through the categories to find one that is most relevant to your website. Check out the other websites that are listed in this category. If they are listed in alphabetical order by title, you may be able to adjust your title so that it ranks higher in this directory.
Click on "add URL" link
Fill out the form. You can copy and paste the submission information that you have saved in your word processing program.
Click Submit

After You Submit

Keep track of the directory search engines that you submit to, including the URL and date of submission. If you receive a confirmation email, flag (or mark that directory on your list). You can visit the sites that don't send you a confirmation email to see if your site has been listed. If not, you may reconsider resubmitting.

While it requires some effort to find and submit to special interest directory search engines, it is worth it. Getting indexed and improving your search engine rankings will bring your website more traffic.

In our next lesson, we will discuss how to build more incoming links by publishing article for reprint on other websites.

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