Search Engine Submission Guidelines

To put it simply, Search engine submission involves submitting a web site directly to a web search engine by webmasters. Though it is not necessary to submit the web pages manually as the spiders are capable of finding the web pages independently.

Web site submission is typically done in the case of new web sites that might take time to get indexed by the search engines. Web master also submit web pages to make sure that these sites are updated in the respective search engines.

Submission process

Webmasters can submit a few web pages at a time or can submit the entire site at one time with a sitemap. However, in most cases only the home page needs to be submitted as the search engines are capable of crawling the whole site by using the home page, which is well optimized and designed perfectly.

Most websites want to be listed in popular search engines and the web pages that appear high on the search results get the maximum visibility and user clicks compared to the results in the lower pages. Most search engine users never bother to scroll beyond the first page of search engine results, which makes it a hotly contested fight among websites to rank the best to find a place in top 10 search result page.

To ensure the best position in search engine results, webmasters must optimize their web pages, the process of which is called search engine optimization. The placement and density of keywords, the web page designs, navigation links and the number of web pages are some of the factors that could influence the pagerank of a website.

PageRank depends largely on the linking network that any web site might have. Greater the number of external links, greater will be the page rank. Links from pages that enjoy a higher PR, will be considered as of high value by search engines.

XML sitemaps

Google Sitemaps that came into existence in June 2005 enable the web developers to publish lists of links from across their sites. This would give the information on the various pages and the content in a website to the search engines.

XML sitemaps are supported by Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN and the location of these maps can be set up using a robots.txt file that would assist the search engines find the Sitemaps.

Relevance of search engine submission

Search engine submission has lost much of relevance these days as the major search engines like “the big four”, Google, MSN, Ask.com and Yahoo have the ability to spot new web pages by indexing links from other sites. However there could be exceptions for this rule as in the case of a new web site that has no inbound links as yet. In such cases search engines are not in a position to automatically discover the new site and a search engine submission might be necessary.

However, the popular search engines in China and India do not automatically index web sites and require manual submission. If websites are not submitted to search engines, webmasters may be compromising on the visitor’s traffic being generated through these search engines.