Forrester Research estimates that there are 500 to 600 million pages 
on the Internet and that number is growing fast. However, the largest search 
engine, AltaVista, only has about 150 million pages indexed (about 27% of the 
Web), with Excite and Lycos at only about 50 million indexed (about 10% of 
the Web)! From September 1996 to September 1997, none of the search engines 
increased in size significantly, despite the fact that the web continued 
to grow!
 
To a webmaster, these are shocking statistics! 
Why are relatively few pages indexed? 
(1) The Web is growing faster than the engines can keep up with, 
and 
(2) many webmasters do not know how to design and submit their pages correctly. 
Getting and staying indexed well in a search engine takes a little more work 
than most people assume. 

You need a four-step approach.
 
The first thing you need to do is make sure all your web pages can be 
reached from your home page within three clicks.  
Most engines will only crawl three levels deep when indexing your site. 
Also, make sure all your pages have TITLE tags and META description and 
keyword tags, as most engines now use these.  It is also highly advisable 
to have META category, language, and robot revisit tags, and ALT tags on all 
your images. Don't just slap these into your pages.  Put some thought into 
them. For example, the text in the TITLE tag for a particular page should 
start with a word that summarizes the entire page (a keyword). Say you have 
a page that mostly has information on vacations in Cancun, Mexico. Your TITLE 
tag should read something like 'Cancun vacations, tours, and travels in Mexico. 
Packages include diving...' The word 'Cancun' starts the sentence, and the 
rest of the sentence is made up of keywords that are related to the content 
of the page. This goes a long way toward getting you better rankings; same 
thing with the META tag text.

If you use frames on your site, make sure you use good NOFRAMES tags since 
not all major engines support frames. If you don't, your pages simply will 
not be indexed by those engines. 
 
If you use image maps, make sure you have a text links navigation bar 
somewhere on the same page, as not all major engines support image maps
either. Quick note: the TITLE tag text should be at most 200 characters long, 
with the first 80 characters being the most important, as these are the ones 
most engines focus on in ranking and results display. Do not simply repeat 
keywords in the title tag. Make some grammatical sense out of the sentences 
but ensure that the keywords feature early and are not diluted by too many 
'junk' words.

The second thing to do is submit only your home page and other major page 
and then let the engines crawl your site. I will explain this in depth below. 
(The only exception is Infoseek. Infoseek does not crawl so you must submit
every page on your site to it manually.) 

Because the engines are so overwhelmed, you need a third step - you must 
monitor your submission and re-submit your home page every couple of weeks. 
The engine may have taken your submission but dropped it later (this happens 
a lot with Excite), gone to your site and found it unavailable at the time, 
or just not indexed your site due to a technical error on its part.
Resubmitting and checking on your submission every two weeks will ensure 
that you will eventually get in and stay in the index.
 
Fourth, you need to get as many people linking to your site as possible. 
Visit related sites and ask for a link to your site. There is a trend by the 
engines to increasingly use link popularity and traffic as an indicator of 
relevancy. What this means is that the more people link to your page 
relative to your competitors' pages, the more highly you will rank on the 
engines. Not only will getting many incoming links get you a better rank 
on the engines, but it will also get you a lot of traffic (following links 
is the second most popular way people find new sites). Furthermore, 
on Excite, HotBot, and Lycos, link popularity also determines whether the 
engine will crawl deep into your site and index more pages or not.
Do not ignore this fourth step, no matter how hard it sounds!
 
For the major engines, do not leave the submission process to automated 
programs and services. The major search engines are too important and the 
automated services sometimes do it wrong. You are only submitting the home 
page and one other major page to Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, 
Northern Light, and HotBot - that is not much work to do manually every two
weeks! 

- About Spamdexing
 
Because the search engines are so overwhelmed, they are coming up with more 
ways to make their job easier and weed out pages they feel are not worth 
indexing. One of the new developments is that most engines now insist or
highly recommend that you only submit your home page to them and let the 
engine crawl through your site and index the pages it finds. If you decide 
to go against this recommendation and submit a whole bunch of pages through 
the online submission forms, you will risk being tagged a "spamdexer" 
(index spammer). There is also an indication that engines like AltaVista 
give a higher ranking to crawled pages than submitted pages. So for your 
own interests, you want your pages crawled so that they have a higher score. 
Other engines like Excite will take the same amount of time to add your 
pages to their index whether you submit them manually or let it crawl 
to them from your home page. So not only will you be wasting your time 
submitting each and every page you have to Excite, but you will risk 
spamming that engine. 

Conclusion: submit only your home page and one other major page and let the 
engines crawl your site. The only exception is Infoseek. Infoseek does not 
crawl so you must submit every page on your site to it manually. You can 
make a list of URLs to your pages and email that to Infoseek if you have 
more than 50 pages you wish to submit (see their submission page for more 
details). 

There are a few other things to watch for to avoid having your pages 
excluded from the engines. The following make an engine tag a particular 
page as spam and therefore not index it. Make sure that none of your pages 
has any of these.
 
1. Keyword stuffing. This is the repeated use of a word to increase its 
frequency on a page. Search engines have the ability to analyze a page 
and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion 
to the rest of the words in the document. 
2. Invisible text. Some webmasters stuff keywords at the bottom of a page 
and make their text color the same as that of the page background. This is 
also detectable by the engines. 
3. Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text. 
4. Page redirects. Some engines, especially Infoseek, do not like pages that
take the user to another page without his or her intervention, 
e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side 
techniques. If you use redirection, it should have a delay 
of about 7 seconds. 
5. META tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in the META tags more 
than 1 to 3 times, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the content 
of your site. 
6. Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same 
search engine. 
7. Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate 
a web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all. 
That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood the engine.  
 
Below are several useful facts and tips for each major search engine 
that you can use to improve your search engine marketing.

- AltaVista
Facts:
Pages in index in millions: 150 
Time it takes to index a submitted page: 1-2 days 
Time it takes to index crawled pages (may take longer than indicated): 
1 day to 1 month 
How to check if your page is on the index: In the search box, type: 
'+url: yourcompany.com/yourpage.htm'. 
How to check how many pages link to your site: 
In the search box, type: 'link:yourcompany.com'. 
You can narrow your search to a particular directory or page like: 
'link:yourcompany.com/ourpage.htm'. 
To eliminate from the results all the pages within your own domain that 
link to each other, use the -url command: 
'link:yourcompany.com -url:yourcompany.com' 
Supports frame pages: Yes 
Supports image maps: Yes
 
- HotBot 
Facts:
Pages in index in millions: 110 
Time it takes to index a submitted page: 2 days to 2 weeks 
Time it takes to index crawled pages (may take longer than indicated): 
About 2 weeks 
How to check if your page is on the index: 
Select the advanced search options and enter your page's URL. 
How to check how many pages link to your site: In the search box, type:
'linkdomain:yourcompany.com'. 
To eliminate from the results all the pages within your own domain 
that link to each other, use the -domain command like: 
'linkdomain:yourcompany.com -domain:yourcompany.com'. 
These methods get you all the pages linking to your domain. 
To find the links to only a particular page, 
enter your URL into the search box, then choose the "links to this URL" 
option. 
Supports frame pages: No 
Supports image maps: No 
 
- Infoseek  
Facts:
Pages in index in millions: 75 
Time it takes to index a submitted page: 1 day for pages submitted online, 
7 days for email submissions. 
Time it takes to index crawled pages (may take longer than indicated): 
Rarely spiders, if it does then 1 - 2 months 
How to check if your page is on the index: In the search box, type: 
'URL: http://www.yourcompany.com/page.htm'. 
How to check how many pages link to your site: 
In the search box, type: 'link:yourcompany.com'. 
You can narrow your search to a particular directory or page like: 
'link:yourcompany.com/ourpage.htm'. 
To eliminate from the results all the pages within your own domain 
that link to each other, use the -url command like: 
'link:yourcompany.com -url:yourcompany.com' 
Supports frame pages: No 
Supports image maps: Yes 

- Excite
Facts: 
Pages in index in millions: 55 
Time it takes to index a submitted page: About 2 weeks 
Time it takes to index crawled pages (may take longer than indicated): 
Up to 6 weeks 
How to check if your page is on the index: 
In the search box, type in the full URL of the page. 
How to check how many pages link to your site: N/A 
Supports frame pages: No 
Supports image maps: No
 
- Lycos 
Facts:
Pages in index in millions: 50 
Time it takes to index a submitted page: 2-4 weeks 
Time it takes to index crawled pages (may take longer than indicated): 
2-4 weeks 
How to check if your page is on the index: Not available. 
How to check how many pages link to your site: N/A 
Supports frame pages: No (limited) 
Supports image maps: No 

- Yahoo! 
Facts:
Yahoo is the most popular directory on the web. 
Many people have problems getting their site listed. 
A rough estimate is that only 1 out of every 10 submissions gets listed, 
if that. Moreover, it takes an estimated 4 to 15 weeks to be listed 
for those who actually get listed! 
Those who got listed had to resubmit their site an estimated 4 times over 
several weeks or months before getting listed (resubmitting often 
is spamming, by the way). One thing is for sure - you must get into Yahoo! 
Yahoo actually brings some sites over 50% of their business. 
By the way, Yahoo now has an express submission service whereby 
you pay $199 for a response to your submission within 7 weeks. It doesn't 
guarantee that you will be listed with them, but at least you get to know 
within 7 days whether you are in or if not, why. 
Here is a set of links that you need to visit to learn how 
to successfully get into Yahoo.

http://help.yahoo.com/help/search/url/

http://howto.yahoo.com/chapters/10/1.html

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9903-yahoo.html

- Best Wishes! 

That is a lot of information to work with!
 
You might feel as if you don't really want to bother yourself 
and follow all we've talked about. That would be a big mistake! 
Consider what it's worth in this way: The top search engines 
each charge $52,000 and up for banner ads tied to a keyword. 
They make it expensive because they know it's effective and valuable. 
Now, if you were positioned in the top 10 or 30 results, free of charge 
using web pages that you submit to the top 5 search engines, 
that would be like buying $260,000 worth of advertising per keyword! 
But all you have to do is take a few simple steps that most webmasters 
fail to take and you will get this free! 

(Statistical information gathered from: 
SearchEngineWatch.com 
and 
SearchPositioning.com. 
For more information, please visit these sites.) 

Article by David Gikandi 
of   Search Positioning.com. 

David is a programmer at SearchPositioning.com. 
SearchPositioning.com features tools and resources that get you top 
positions for your web site on AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, 
and Lycos. It also has forums, articles, links, and other free resources 
useful for the website owner and marketer.

Many More Web Page, Search Engine, Marketing Articles

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