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Registering Your Site
You can register your website yourself or pay a submission service to handle all the details for you.
Is manual submission better than automatic submission?
Some people will tell you that manually submitting your site is the only way to go (and offer to do it for you for a fee). Others say it doesn't really matter - they are wrong.
The different search engines and directories have different requirements for title and description lengths. Yahoo in particular needs these details carefully thought out before you do your once-in-a-lifetime submissionto them for your site.
Some services ask you to pay a lot of money to have them submit to "the top 500 search engines and indexes." Even assuming that they actually have a good list of special-purpose indexes, and aren't submitting your site to a bunch of useless Free-For-All links pages, of those 500 sites, perhaps 20 are appropriate for any particular promotion and will actually generate hits for you. The truth, which most people won't tell you, is that the top 10 sites on the net (places like Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc.), will probably generate 90% of your visitor traffic.
Registering your site will get you more hits, but it will take weeks or months for the increased traffic to become noticeable. After you register your site with a particular search engine or index, it can take anything from 5 seconds to 5 months for them to actually list you, if in fact they actually do. Many indexes are very selective and only list some of the submissions they get.
Registration by itself isn't enough; you have to have web-pages that "rank highly" with the search engines.
Finally, while registering your site (and getting good rankings on the search engines) is an important part of site promotion, it is important to understand that it is only one part of the process.
continue to Choosing search keywords
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