Manual Submissions | Directions for the Top 5 Engines

We went over the strong proponents for organic SEO yesterday, so lets start manual submissions today. Organic SEO is a 6 step process, product selection (select a niche that you can successfully promote), design (design as accessible, promotable site), optimization (do your SEO site and page mechanics 100%), link building (preferably one way organic backlinks), and the part we are covering marketing (manual submissions to engines, directories, and social bookmarking).

Firstly, NEVER start submission until your site is complete. Its bad business. Understand that the text you use for submissions should be relevant and just as "un"spammy as your tags, but does not have to match you tags. You can amend this information to suit the interest of the engine or directory. When submitting dig deep into the indexes categories to find the simplest category to submit to, so they are most likely to accept your submission. Do not use "CAPS" or tons of repetitive or !!!!!!! exclamatory punctuation.

First submit to DMOZ the Open Directory Project. Be very carefully with the spammy things on this one, keep it simple. It is human edited. They will not notify you either way, but if you are not listed in 3 months, then consider re listing.

Now when submitting to Google there are 2 ways, I suggest you sign up for Webmaster's Tools follow the directions for adding your site and sitemap and you are good to go. If you don't want to use Google's tools, then you can request a crawl, it is suggested that you put the sites title in note.

Yahoo is set up a lot like Google is with tools, even more powerful tools in my opinion, as you can submit feeds to Yahoo. Sign up for Yahoo Site Explorer, or request a crawl. Read our article for Site explorer help.

MSN is easy just submit one time, and they pick up sites quickly, just not very deeply. They accept sub domains, such as blogs, and you can submit your individual pages for deeper indexing.

Ask.com does its own thing, I have heard that aside from pinging them with your sitemap, the only thing you can do is get linked to someone whom they have indexed. The directions for sitemap pinging are way at the bottom, if you don't get a success message you did it wrong.

AOL Search uses Google results.

Lycos uses crawler-based results from Ask and paid results from Google.

Netscape is AOL.

There are many more engines you will find to submit to. I suggest you look in to a forum, I use this one....they are helpful and not overly critical. Be weary of engines and directories that don't say they crawl, but don't ask anything about your site except the url. It's ok to pay for directory listings, but investigate the engine, the neighbourhood, the class of the links they have listed, how many links be page, etc. Make sure it is not a link farm, or you will have wasted you money, as Google will toss them out. Keep it free for the first 3-6 months to build trust and reliability.
I recommend not using automated submission protocol devices and programs, they do more harm than good. You can safely update most listings every 4-6 weeks, read each one and make a list. Over submitting is also spam, and they will throw out all your listings, generally.

Peace and SEO
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