Ready to submit your site to the directories and search engines? Sure? Any bad links or "under construction" signs? Are your TITLE and META tags in order? Keywords optimized, server log files organized, and traffic analysis software ready? Here's a checklist to go through before you start promoting your site.
Time to submit your site to the search engines? Maybe not. Take your hand off your mouse, take a deep breath, and ask yourself if your site is really ready. Some search engines will send a robot to index your site, while some may conceivably send a real human being. If you make a bad first impression, you may not get listed at all, or you may get listed, but not properly indexed.
September 10, 1999
Nowadays, you need all the help you can get if you want your site to be noticed, so make sure you can answer "yes" to all the questions on this checklist, and then start submitting. After all, submitting your site to the appropriate search engines and directories only takes a few hours (less, if you use an automated submission tool such as Selfpromotion.com). You've got plenty of time to make sure you get the most out of your listings that you can.
Is your site really ready for visitors?
You may think that a little blinking "under construction" sign is cute, but it's an absolute traffic-killer. Most directories will reject sites that have sections "under construction", and what little traffic you get will consist of one-time visitors. If a section isn't ready, either wait until it is ready, or omit all links to it.
The same goes for bad links and other site errors. Check your site thoroughly and make sure that every t is crossed and every i dotted. A tool like LinkBot can be handy for finding dead links and other errata. If you have Java, Javascript, or other scripting technology on your site, make sure it's all been tested with a wide range of browsers.
Are your TITLE and META tags in order?
Some search engines use your TITLE as the description of your site, and some will use both TITLE and META tags to index your site. Your TITLE should contain keywords, but should still be brief and readable. The same goes for your META description tag.
Your META keywords tag should contain words that you think people will use when searching for pages like yours. However, there must not be any keywords in the META tag that are not found on the page, for search engines will penalize you for this. Keywords should be plural, all lower case, no word repeated more than once, and the most important ones at the end.
Bad:
<head>
<title>Welcome to my site!</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Acme Company Web Site">
<meta name="keywords" content="Acme, Web Sites">
</head>
<head>
<title>Acme Widgets - Offering a full line of rust-free Widgets, Wadgets and Wudgets.</title>
<meta name="description" content="Acme Widgets - Offering a full line of rust -free Widgets, Wadgets and Wudgets. Lifetime warranty, free delivery.">
<meta name="keywords" content="wadgets,wudgets,widgets,widgets">
</head>
Are you hip to the robots.txt file?
Most of us have a few "test" pages, or perhaps pages of personal material, that we keep on our Web server, but that isn't meant to be seen by the public. Straight search engines like Excite and Altavista, however, will automatically "spider" and index every page on your site, unless you tell them not to. Create a text file called "robots.txt," and place it in your Web site's root directory (usually the "htdocs" directory). This file has a list of pages or directories that you want to keep the spiders out of, and it looks something like this:
This tells all visiting spiders not to fool with any of the 3 named directories. Note that the directory names must end with a "/".
Are you prepared to measure your traffic?
Some wise man said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Be sure to keep your server log files safe, and use the software tool of your choice to analyze them. Your ISP may offer one or more free tools for your use. Getstats is one popular free one. If you can shell out a few hundred bucks, high-powered traffic analysis packages like Hit List or Web Trends can really help you boost your traffic by telling you how many hits are coming from each search engine, and what keywords people are searching on to reach your site.
Are you prepared to handle the traffic?
Make no mistake, getting listed on the search engines will boost your traffic, so be prepared. Make sure your account at your ISP allows enough bandwidth for a comfortable safety margin, and enough disk space to handle the logs which you hope will soon be ballooning. And how about your customer service staff? All the traffic in the world won't help you if your fulfillment people are overworked or inefficient. If you take orders by phone, don't forget that the Web is worldwide. Are you prepared to take orders from different countries and different time zones?
Are you experienced?
Submitting your site properly is critically important, and it's a more complex subject than it appears on the surface. As a site owner, you owe it to yourself to learn how the various search engines work, even if you use a submission service. No paid submitter cares as much about your site as you do, so take the time to poke around the various search engines, and read lots of articles like this one.
The criteria that the various search engines use to rank your site seems to change almost daily, so be sure to keep up with the latest. Search Engine Watch is a good resource, as is the WDJ Suit Hub. Selfpromotion.com also has some good up-to-date submitting wisdom, as well as being a useful tool in its own right.
This article is part of the Web Developer's Journal's Web Site Promotion Guide, a collection of articles on how to increase Web site traffic.
