Submitting your site
Although automated submission software and sites may seem like a time and effort saving method of getting your site listed, in reality these methods are often penalised by the search engines. Altavista, for example, forces you to enter a code that could not be read by an automated submission program before you can submit a site to its database. If you only have a small number of URLs, it is usually better to do the submissions manually.
Click here for information on how to get your site submitted for you, or use the links below to hand submit your site to the most important search engines:
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Alltheweb (Fast Search) relies entirely on its own crawler, and supplies content to Lycos. Any page you submit will be crawled and indexed so all the links from your default page will be found.
Altavista
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Altavista has it's own crawler, but also gets results from Looksmart, the Open Directory Project (ODP) and others. Altavista will follow the links on the page you submit, and index the other pages that it finds. Although AltaVista reads all the text on each page, it is especially important to have good keywords in your title, meta tags, and in the first lines of text on the page. Altavista will throw out sites that submit too often, although there is no theoretical limit to the number of pages you may submit.
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Google is fast becoming the most respected search engine on the web. It uses a combination of off and on page factors to determine your sites relevancy. If you are an online bookstore with many incoming links from other bookstores, you will be rewarded by Google's ranking algorithm. Spamming techniques like repeated keywords and invisible text will be penalised by Google. Google prefers large sites with lots of content.
Lycos
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Lycos shows results firstly from its own directory (which is an edited version of the ODP) and then from alltheweb.
Open Directory Project
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The Open Directory is (as you have probably guessed by the name) a directory and not a search engine. It is included here because its results are included on a number of the largest search engines, like AOL, Lycos, Netscape and Google, to name a few. Google, for example, prefers sites that have an ODP listing.
