How to Get Listed on the Search Engines

Search Engines. Everybody wants to be on them and the nearer to the top the better. Why? Because search engines bring you people who are actually looking for what you sell. It's like the Yellow Pages. People use them when they're ready to buy and if you show up on the top of the list, you're highly likely to get the first chance at the sale.

Now that we've established the importance of getting listed on the search engines, let's look at some of the criteria they use to list you. A book can literally be written on this topic as the criteria vary from search engine to search engine but the following are some of the common ones that can get you where you want to be.

Buy your way in

The fastest and surest way to get onto the search engines and enjoy a guaranteed decent ranking in the top 10 results is to buy your way in. Almost all search engines offer "pay-per-click advertising" or what the industry likes to call PPC. Ranking using this method usually depends on how much you bid on a key word, meaning most search engines use a type of auction system to rank you. While this is not the only option, it must be mentioned so that if you find any of the following daunting or too much work, you're aware that you do have a choice.

To get indexed without paying isn't easy and to get ranked high and to preserve that ranking is a talent in itself, especially since the search engines tend to revise their criteria from time to time. Given the fact that they do revise, although we've touched on this topic before, we too need to revise what we've said before to keep you up-to-date on what's happening in the industry. Now let's look at how to get listed for free.

Repetition of Key Words

First, we need to explain what are key words. Just think of it like this. The words that your potential customers are likely to type in when searching for your product or service are your key words. You need to have these on your web page and the more often the better. For example, if you sell shoes and your store name is Paymore trust me, no one is going to be searching for Paymore. People are likely to search for shoes. This is therefore one of your key words. Of course, you will have the politically correct carrot who doesn't search for shoes but for footwear, meaning this is another key word you want on your website. OK, there will be some people looking for your store in particular and will type in your store name and that's great and this should work just fine too, but needless to say - I hope - your name would obviously be prominent on your website anyway.

Now, can you therefore try to trick the search engine by putting the key words in succession like this, "shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, and more shoes" so as to ensure a higher ranking than your competitor? As a rule, you should never set out to trick the search engine or anyone else for that matter. The smarter search engines' robots will eventually pick up on what you're doing and boy will they drop you to the bottom of their rankings! That is of course if they don't delete you altogether.

Use Robot-Readable Content

We mentioned robots in the previous paragraph because this is what most search engines use. There are hardly any search engines with staff manually adding websites to their indices. The robots are trained to read text. This means that you should try to use more text on your website than images or flash which they have difficulty reading.

Antiquity

Very important for your ranking is the age of your website. A website bought today will not appear in the search engines tomorrow for free. In fact, the average time to get ranked has gone up to 12-15 months because millions of websites around the world are begging the robots to come look at them. So the earlier you start your website, the higher you will rank, even if it's just one page. This also underlines the importance of getting your website up and running now. If all that separates you from your competitor is who got on the Web first and you both have all of the other criteria in place, the older one will get placed higher.

Updating Frequency

The more frequently you update your website, the higher you will rank. The robots, once they find you and like you, come back at certain intervals to see if you have new content and of course to ensure that you haven't gone out of business.

Your Domain Name

To Google, this doesn't seem to mean too much but to engines like MSN, your name in .com is key. So if your domain name is Matikoor.com and you sell bridal accessories, you could show up high on Google for bridal accessories while on MSN you're likely to be number one for Matikoor. A good strategy is to get both names in .com.

Title

What's the title of your webpage? The search engines pay attention to this too. If you throw in some of your key words there that would also help your ranking.

Links

Was I saving the best for last? Links are extremely important to practically every major search engine, so get as many websites as possible to link to your website. The search engines assume that the more websites linked to yours, the more important it must be and rank you higher.

Unique Content

So we were not saving the best for last because this is the last point on this list and it is not exactly the best but still worth mentioning. Search engines like unique content. This is why parked pages tend to get low rankings if any. What's a parked page? A page with either a standard "coming soon" or "under construction" notice or with a plethora of link ads.

There are more criteria not mentioned above. In fact, some search engines like Google guard their criteria like trade secrets but the above are the main ones that have been tried, tested and proven. So now it's your turn to go try, test and prove.

Aleem Khan is an accredited Internet Expert with the http://www.InternationalInternetAuthority.com which is a safe place to GetYourNameIn.com

What Are Search Engines?
Search engines are actually robots or as others call them bots. No they are not robot machines as in the movie "The terminator". They are programs or ...

4 Keys To Search Engine Web Marketing
If you have a website, you want visitors. And if you want visitors, you probably already know that it's important to get your website listed in the ma...

How To Get Your Website Listed on Yahoo Within 2 Hours
Ok you have a website and you want to get listed in Yahoo. You have submitted your site and its been a few weeks and you are getting annoyed and you d...

Free Search Engine Submission - Is It Really Free?
How can you build up traffic to your site?Developing your site is only the first phase to the complex process of online marketing. Getting your site t...

How to Get Listed in Search Engines
Getting listed in the search engine is the first step to the success of your web site. Considering about 85% of the people use search engine to look f...

Fast Search Engine Traffic - 5 Steps for Search Engine Traffic
With the use of internet increasing to its current level, the search engines have become very important. Now if anyone has to look for any relevant in...

Profitable Search Engine Marketing - Essential Secrets Behind Successful Search Engine Marketing
If you search for a certain keyword online, you will be surprised with the many results that are being returned by search engines. So that means if yo...

What You Need To Know To Avoid Getting Banned By The Search Engines
Search engine placement is one of the best ways to generate traffic on the web. Having a website on the first page for a widely used search term guara...

Introduce Your Website To Search Engines
If you have a web-based company or if a considerable portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and m...

The Importance of Keywords for Your Website
Did you know that 85% of individuals use search engines to track down the information they require and that only 1 hit out of 15 will actually bring t...

Product Promotion Through Shopping Search Engines
eCommerce sites listing in shopping search engines means create a free or paid products catalog & let them to list or display in a shopping search eng...

Getting the Right Amount of Rank With Search Engines
Search Engines are typically useful to generate traffic on your site. Google and Yahoo are two of the most prominent search engines available on the ...

4 Keys To Advance In Search Engine Traffic
Finding the best search engine traffic has become a science to some people, and as a result much more sophisticated means of reaching clients is possi...

Search Engine Marketing; Three Tips
Ranking high is search engine results is one of the most rewarding web marketing strategies available. But how is it actually done?1. Unique Title Tag...

Search Engines: The Internet Steam Cars
Most of us who use the internet take search engines for granted. We simply enter what we are looking for, hit enter, and almost instantly many options...