Shoestring Marketing Strategy 1:
Search Engine and Directory Registration

Registering means to let search engines and directories know that your site is up and ready to be included among their listings. Just be aware that registering and actually being listed are two different things. You have to be patient and persistent. Here's how to go about it.

META Tags

It's important to design your website so that each webpage includes a clear page title since when your site shows up on a search engine, the webpage title will be displayed. This isn't the headline that you place between HTML <H1> tags, but the title placed between HTML <TITLE> tags. The title of each page ought to be both descriptive as well as provocative. For example, "Widget Specifications" might be better titled "Acme Widgets Have Won Five International Awards for Quality." Think of the webpage title as a vital marketing tool.

Two other META tags are important to search engines listings of your site. The description META tag is used by some search engines as the sentence or two they display below your webpage title. Limit this to about 200 characters or so. The keywords META tag will include half dozen to several dozen words that someone might search on in order to find your website. Lately I've been inserting keywords separated by spaces rather than commas because experts I trust tell me that this allows search engines to better create their own combinations of keywords. There's both science and old wives tales that contribute to META tag lore. You can learn more in the Search Engine section of our Web Marketing Info Center (www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/searchengine.htm) and at Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch.com (www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/).

Search Engines

There's an important distinction between search engines and directories. A search engine is an automated indexing system that periodically sends a robotic "spider" to your website to "crawl" (that is, scan and index) some or all of your webpages. A directory, on the other hand, is a listing describing your website edited by humans. In order to get on the search engines' radar you need to register your webpages. Here are some of the most important North American search engines with which to register: AOL Search, AltaVista, Excite, FAST Search, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, Lycos, MSN Search, NBCi, Netscape Search, and Northern Light. Each of these has a URL where you can suggest your own webpage, but nearly all the search engines can be submitted to at one time using a free submission system such as the All4one Submission Machine (www.all4one.com/all4submit/) or JimTools (www.jimtools.com -- but skip his FFA submissions). Then be patient. The time lapse from you registering your site until the time the listing actually appears on the Web can be weeks.

Directories

Search engines are vital, but directories arguably drive as much or more traffic to your site. And increasingly, search engines are combined with directories, so they'll include information from both human edited directories as well as automatically indexed webpages. The most important directory by far in most countries of the world is Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com). But they are very picky about what they'll include in a listing and reject many listings because of shoddy websites. You'll also want a listing in the DMOZ Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) since its material are also used by HotBot, Lycos, and Netscape Search. A third important directory is LookSmart (www.looksmart.com) -- not because it gets a lot of hits itself, but because its listings feed into search results from MSN Search, Excite, AltaVista, iWon, and CCN.com. The other directory that you should submit to is Ask Jeeves! (www.ask.com).

Paying for Directory Inclusion

In the past year commercial sites have had to pay $199 for a listing to be considered for Yahoo! and another $199 for Express Submit at LookSmart. I recommend that you pay for a Yahoo! listing first, and then, if you can afford it, a LookSmart listing. I think these are some of your best-spent marketing dollars. You'll sometimes see ads such as, "We submit your site to 500 search engines for only $50." Don't bother! Only a dozen or so search engines are important anyway -- the rest are essentially wannabes or disguised spam mongers. Beware.