Search Engine Registration

The Art of Search Engine Registration

As little as three years ago I was personally amazed at the number of people who thought you could come up with a web site, publish to a web hosting company, and the the world would beat a path to your door and you could make a good living off it, and maybe even get rich. Some were not that naive and knew you had to register it with a search engine to be found. They went to their favorite search engine and registered their web site. They may have even gone to a few other they were aware of and registered with them as well. In fact this is also a little naive. Today many people believe they just have to register with three or four main search engines and  and they are good to go. Just sit back and watch the traffic, and presumably the money, come rolling in. If only it were that easy and simple!

As author Paul Gilster puts it in Digital Literacy "How could the world beat a path to your door when the path was uncharted, uncatalogued, and could be discovered only serendipitously?".

So what do you really need to do and who do you need to register with? Their are four main players as of January 2006. They are Google (over 50% of the searches) in number one, Yahoo! and MSN Search are now actually tied for second. And "Ask Jeeves" (ask.com) is in fourth place. If you want to know more about how this started go to our section on a brief history of search engines.

So you ask, why do I need a search engine registration service? Why not just register with the top three or four who make up 92% of the searches? Good question!  The search engines have feeds from many other meta engines, web crawlers, internet spiders, robots and other means of gathering data such as their own web crawlers.

One of the things search engines look at besides content is links. If you appear in another search engine, or a directory, or an FFA (Free For All) web site, each one of those counts as a link. The problem is the total number of these combined as of the year 2000 is about 2300 to 2400 sites. If you don't have the links these other registrations provide, you will not rank well in the top 4 search engines. All the search engines look to see how many links there are to your web site and what other search engines you are listed in. No links, no page one rankings. It's that simple.

So what do you do? Hire a company that has commercial software to register your web site with all 2300-2400 sites every 30 days! Or you could just do it yourself. The registration process, once you get good at it takes about 6 minutes per search engine/directory/FFA site. So you can do ten per hour. That is 100 every day assuming you can find them all and devote 10 hours a day to them. Gee, in only 23 straight 10 hour days you could do it yourself. Then you have 7 days to answer all your e-mails and do business before you have to start over again.

Obviously the better choice is to hire someone to do it. Commercial companies have software packages available to do this for them. The package we use does a web site in under 10 minutes and does multiple web sites in a batch mode.

Obviously it is far better to let someone else do it on an absolute schedule at the right times. By the way, search engines do not like you to register with them more often than every 30 days. Registering more often makes a search engine consider that you are trying to "spam" them with frequent registrations and could get you banned from the search engine. So once you have paid the professional you must stop all registration activities of your own.

Another tip to avoid is registering multiple URL's with search engines that point to the same site. Most search engines can see that it is the same site and will not accept them both. Or they will fight with each other over which one will get listed. In either case the ranking for the one who makes it will be lower than normal or the two sites will end up listed but in the abyss of anonymity among the masses of "other" web sites.

On one occasion we had a web site owner who had two URL's (.TV and .COM) that ranked number one after we did his SEO work. The first one was registered with search engines, the second was used in his pay per click campaign. The first one showed up as one of the first three in every search engine, without exception, under web sites! The second one showed up under "sponsored links" on the first page, but was never ever registered with a search engine! Thus he had two URL's on the first page going to the same web site. Had he registered the second URL, he would have still shown up in the sponsored links section, but the two web site URL's would have ranked poorly in the web site section. Search engines do not like being spammed and penalize you for attempts to spam them that could even include banning you from their scanning and listing.

Another previously popular technique of getting your keywords across was to put text at the bottom of the page stuffing in keywords that were the same color as the background of the page so the viewer could not see it, but the search engine could and would scan it. With the goal of optimizing relevant content for it's users, and therefore getting market share and the resulting revenue, search engines have caught on to these old tricks and again consider these tactics as an unfair attempt to influence the ranking of your web site (spamming them). And they will take appropriate retaliation in your ranking status (including possibly banning your web site from the search engine).

How Long Before I See Results?

I show up in one engine but aren't even on the radar in Google,

Don't they work the same?

Patience is a virtue - and a necessary one in Search Engine Optimization

Search engines don't all work the same. Each one has different scanning bots and crawlers and each of those do something different. The results of these scanning bots and web crawlers is also interpreted differently based on the algorithmic equation in the program of that search engine. They are not all the same and each does something differently.

Many customers are disappointed after three months of not ranking in a search engine. Let me present an excerpt written by a member of the webproworld.com newsletter/forum who writes:

"Patience is a virtue...or so they say. It is often hard to explain to a client who does not have a good understanding of how the Internet works, why they shouldn't expect overnight results on google search engine. I have a client who has a site that is 7 months old. It has been indexed by google and for the last two months it has been crawled to the tune of 20+ meg. The site is about 100 pages. Anyway, he sees that he is number one on MSN for his key search term but not even on the radar on google.

I have learned that the number one tool in any Google SEO program is patience. And I tell my clients that want their sites to show up on Google to be patient and not to expect anything for quite a while. Then comes the inevitable question from the client..... "If I am top on MSN then why not Google, don't they all work the same?" That is when I give them the url to this forum and say read away.

I make sure before I accept any money or start any work that they are fully prepared to be patient and understand that in our instant gratification world, things take a long time on Google."

Patience......This may be the time and world of instant gratification for most things, but search engines are not one of them.