Best way to register with search engines?

[tjmilburn]

I need to register my site with search engines. i've noticed some places sell a "package" deal for like $50 where they'll register you with the major ones (google, yahoo etc). Is this a good route to go? Any idea on price? Any good urls for me to look into for doing this? Thanks!

[BerksWebGuy]

Do a search in these forums, also go to Rick's SEO tips HERE (http://rainborick.inpacifica.com/seo-tips.html).

The main search engines are free...make sure you get with dmoz.org (which many search engines, including google, use).

[rainbore]

The topic of submitting sites to search engines comes up so often that I think its a good idea that a few points be made clear.

First of all, you should never pay for a service that simply offers to submit your site to search engines - especially those that suggest they will re-submit your site repeatedly. All of these services simply use automated systems that will rarely do you any good and may do you quite a bit of harm.

Google and Yahoo! are responsible for about 80% of searches done on the Internet. Many of the other search sites rely on the information provided to them by either Google or Yahoo! in one form or another. Both Google and Yahoo! have a page where you can submit your site absolutely free. There are links to the relevant pages on my site through the SEO Tips link in my signature.

Finally, simply submitting your site is not a guarantee that the search engines will add your site to their index. Both Google and Yahoo! require you to have at least one link from another website pointing to your site. In fact, if you have links from other sites, you probably don't need to submit your site at all. Automated submissions are against the Terms of Service of both Google and Yahoo! and may well be ignored anyway.

Once you have submitted your site, it can take several weeks for the search engines to finally crawl your site based on that submission. If you want to see which search engines are visiting your site, you can use a script like my Spider Tracks (http://www.rainbo.net/pub/spiderTracks/getSpiderTracks.html) which will display the activities of search engines on your site based on your server log files.

Finally, you can check to see which pages from your site are in Google or Yahoo! by using the command:

site:www.yoursite.com

If your site is less than 2-3 months old, don't expect it to rank well for your search terms for quite some time yet. Focus on adding new content and promoting your site by other means while still accumulating new links to your site and your rankings will come along.

[casbboy]

Yeah,

If you really want to spend some money [I think Yahoo charges $299 for a quick reviewing of your site] you can take $150 and do something like this:

Talk 1 pr7 [with a page with a limited number of outgoing links] into giving you a good rate for two months for you to try out on a text link.

Talk 2 pr5s [each with a page with a limited number of outgoing links] into giving you a good rate for two months for you to try out on a text link.

With these pages [the three PR pages listed], you are almost guarenteed they are getting indexed by a lot of search engines including our favorites such as Yahoo and Google. And, not only will engines come to your site, but you have your minimum one link plus some nice PageRank bonus too. Help get your site listed a little higher a little sooner.

Only if you have money to throw though. Nice to have friends with established sites link to you too.

When I was looking around, I found about 3 PR7's to textlink to my site for $100 for three months. My site was indexed fast by google. The rest take a little more time. [MSN took about 600 visits before I even saw my site get listed].

Ryan


*I say purchase two months so you may get a bulk rate and it sometimes takes the engines this long to update their link information.