how to register with search engines? (1 Viewer)

[Shawn O]

Greetings all,

A friend of mine wants to register his company website on the major search engines.I've noticed that there are companies that will do this for you.Does anyone know which companies are reputable as there seems to be a ton of them?

Also,are there any other methods of registering?What are the pro's and con's?

Thanks,
Shawn

 

[Brian Ruth]

Shawn: I think, for the most part, search engines have free submission, which is probably a better use for your friend's money (i.e. having him spend it on something else) than spending it on a submission company. My websites are starting to show up in search results despite not having spent any money on submission (though I have spent money on advertising, which I'll get to in a second.)

Anyways, I think the 3 main search engines that your friend needs to submit to are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Most other significant search engines get their data from one of these 3 providers. Google's free submission is here, Yahoo's is here, and MSN's is here. The only other player I can think of with over 5% search share is Ask Jeeves/Teoma, which (it seems) only allows paid inclustion.

The pros and cons of paying for inclusion are (from what I understand) the following:

The pro is that you're usually guaranteed to be indexed in search engines with payed inclusion (possibly with more frequent updating), but the con is that (from what I understand) there is no guarantee that you'll show up well in the search rankings for keywords you target.

I'm by no means an expert on that, though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

The WebMaster World Forums are a great place to look for info (filled with helpful people), I'd recommend that your friend check it out (especially the Paid Inclusion Engine Section) to get his bearings.

As for me, I'd suggest he use his money to advertise on a Pay Per Click search engine (like Google Adwords or Overture), especially if he's selling a consumer product. Also, I'd have him try to get people to link to his site, as links (and the text in them) contribute a great deal to search engine results, especially when content is similar (i.e. a technology/computer related site linking to Dell computers is better than a non-technology/computer related, say a news page that doesn't report on technology). A good place to start would be any other pages he already has established (especially if they are popular and/or linked to in their own right).

Hope this helps.