Attracting Spiders
Being Found by Spiders The whole point to optimizing your website is to increase traffic to it organically. By this time you’re spent countless hours researching content, writing copy for the pages and tweaking the meta data and various tags. You’ve assembled a kick-ass collection of useful, unique-content pages and you’re inches away from going live. You’ve got everything sitting on the server and you’ve checked every link, image and alt tag – everything is perfect. So how do you get the word out? For the purposes for search engine optimization, your next step will include two actions – and one of these could even be skipped. 1 – You will submit this new web-wonder of a website to directories 2 – You will beg, borrow or buy a few links form other, selected, websites Directories – The Yellow Pages of the Internet Recognized directories are your BEST source of inbound links when starting a new website. Sure you’ve heard of Yahoo’s Directory and you might have even heard of the Open Directory Project, but there are dozens more that would be happy to drop a link back to your site – some for free, some for a fee. We’ve already covered a short-list of where you should consider submitting to in the section on Who Is Who. How to Submit to Directories Submit by hand. Take the time to read the submissions instructions provided by each directory, as they all vary slightly. Submitting by hand will take longer, but we’re talking about 10 – 20 submissions total here, not hundreds. If you opt to use software to manage the directory submissions, be aware that the software may be out of date, and what it provides the directory might not match what the directory wants to see. Plus, many submission processes end with a field where you type in text seen in an image. The software app cannot see the text inside the image, so it’ll never complete the process. The directories themselves would prefer you do things manually, too. Using automated software and scripts to submit to them takes resources form their end, and they don’t take kindly to this load on their system. Be safe and submit manually. When to Resubmit The rule of thumb with free directories like DMOZ is simple. Submit your site when it goes live, then check the directory in about 6 months. No kidding. If it’s not there at the 6-month mark, either try to contact an editor, or submit again, then wait. Yes, it can take years to get listed somewhere like DMOZ. Why so long? Well, human volunteers man the Open Directory Project. With the daily count of sites requesting inclusion in the ODP, an Editor might have hundreds of sites to review – if not thousands, each week. Each site must pass the requirements outlined in the submission guidelines, so it takes time to review a site. This time ads up and things get backlogged. Additionally, many categories do not have an Editor, so you get bumped into the list of sites other Editors are reviewing, which further slows the process. Paid Submissions – worth it? This is almost entirely a discussion between you and your wallet. To pay for submissions into the top 10 listed directories from our Who Is Who section, the cost will exceed $700 up front – that’s an average of about $70 a link. Those sources are trusted and will produce quality, relevant inbound (one way) links within days or weeks of your submission, though. My recommendation is simple – this is an investment in your business. Pay for the ones you can afford, as you can afford them. Spiders Are Your Friends Getting links posted on other websites already being crawled by the search engine spiders is another valid way of getting found. Being found this way may happen quickly or slowly – depending on how frequently the spiders crawl the sites you have the links posted on. Many folks announce new websites in posting forums for given topic. Often these forums allow users to have a signature that appears at the bottom of every post the user makes. Putting a link into this signature is a valid way to gaining a link a spider can follow. Please note any forum rules, though, before doing this. Some forums limit signatures, other don’t allow them at all, and still others are fine with text, but no links in signatures. Read the rules and respect them – those posts reflect on your website and getting a warning from a moderator on your first post never looks good. Next up you’ll want to contact some related websites and as for a link. Some will have an automated system where you can simply drop your link into their system and it’ll be posted with all others they post. Some will require a reciprocal link – it’s your choice whether to say yes or no, but if you say yes to the exchange, put the link up and leave it there. Now, as mentioned above, this whole step of looking for websites to get links posted on can be skipped if you so choose – at least for the immediate launch. Getting links in the directories will get your site spiders and from there, it’ll find it’s way into the index to be shown in the SERPs. It’s a good idea, though, to NOT skip this step, as it’s the very beginnings of building a collection of inbound links for your website, which is vitally important to how well you rank.
