Article Surfing Archive

You've finished your website, and it's beautiful. You ensured it would be content rich; you have a plan to maintain fresh content, whether it's through blogs or rotating content. You hired a professional writer to ensure that your content was keyword optimized for the search engines, to raise its rank. You've even paid attention to tags and how they are focused on your web page, and image descriptions for your graphics.

So now you can submit it to the search engines, right?

Wrong. You don't want to submit at all.

The Right Way To Be Found

Instead of submitting directly to search engines, allow your page to be found naturally. The spiders are constantly running down the trail of every link, cataloguing where pages are and recording them in the search engine database. Allowing your site to be found this way allows it to rise naturally in the search engines as each new link is catalogued and included in your placement algorithm.

What you want, then, is to be found because of links to your site. If you're starting with a fresh slate, you should first list your site with directories. Directories appear similar to search engines, and are used, like search engines, to find sites of interest. But search engines use spiders to fill a dynamic database. Directories, on the other hand, are dependent upon manual registration of each site. If you want your site to show up in directories, you need to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it.

The best part about directories is that each one provides you with a one-way link to your website ' the exact thing that the search engine spiders seek out.

The Major Directories

For years, Yahoo! has been recognized as the premier online directory. That's only natural; it started life as a list of Jerry Yang's favourite links in 1994. Today, Yahoo! has both a search engine component, included in 1998 as a feed from Alta Vista, and a directory component. You should submit your site to the Yahoo! directory manually; certain sites may have to pay to be listed.

The other major directory is Dmoz, an open directory that shares its data freely with hundreds of other websites. Dmoz is always free to list with, and is surprisingly underused.

With either major directory, you should list your site by hand yourself; only you can properly determine what category you should appear in, and your categorization is critical to how well you're ranked by the search engines; list in the wrong one, and you won't make a dent.

Other Directories

Besides the major directories, there are thousands of free directories for every imaginable niche market; you should list with any of these that are appropriate to your site content.

In addition to the free directories, there are a number of paid directories you can list with. Though you should first go ahead and register with the larger free directories you find out there, later you should go back and register with some of the paid sites as well. Not everyone will pay to acquire this link, and many of the paid sites are seen by the search engines as more authoritative, and will be weighted more heavily than other directories.