Author: Tim Priebe

First, a disclaimer. I'm not talking about getting your site to rank high on search engine results. That's a completely different issue altogether. All I'm addressing is how to get your site indexed by those search engines, so that if you search for key words that are in your site, your site will be somewhere in there.


There's two basic ways to get your site listed by Google and other search engines. The first is do directly submit your site to them. For this one, we first want to know what the top search engines are, so that we only bother submitting to them.

Neilsen//NetRatings is one of the top sites for various internet statistics. Here are their top 5 search engines with the percentage of the share of total searches. These are for June 2006, so the results may be somewhat different by now.

Google - 49.4%
Yahoo! - 23.0%
MSN - 10.3%
AOL - 6.9%
Ask.com - 2.3%

Clearly, Google is the most important one to submit to. But submitting to the top 3 will cover 82.7%. Although AOL actually uses Google's results, so submitting to just the top 3 will actually cover 89.6% of the searches done on the internet. And once your site is picked up by those search engines, the others will follow automatically.

Here are the links, as of September 2006, for submitting your site directly to search engines.

Google - www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo! (requires registration) - www.ds.yahoo.com/search/submit/free/*-http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
MSN - www.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2

Interestingly enough, this submission method is actually the slower of the two. The other is to have another site that's already listed in the search engines, and add a link on that site to yours.

This second method is one that I use with my clients. Whenever I finish a site, I post a blog entry about it and include a link to the new site. If you have a blog or some other site that's already included in the search engines' results, you can just add a link to your site there. If not, you can ask a friend to add a link to your new site on their blog or website.

Failing either of those options, you can email someone with a related site and ask them to link to your site.

You can, of course, use both of the methods to submit your site. Personally, I've found the links method to be the best, and that's now the one I use exclusively.

About the Author:
Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com "