Searchengine Submissions
The best way to drive traffic to your site is by getting listed in the major search engines. Most sites get the majority of new traffic to their sites because people search for a relevant phrase at one of the search sites. There are basically three ways you can add your url to the search engine databases, and the major sites with my rankings for them are:
pay for inclusion: pay an annual fee to be included in their database of sites
- Yahoo Directory ***
pay per click (PPC): pay a per-click charge for appearing in search results
- Yahoo Sponsored Search (Overture)****
- Google Adwords ****
- 7Search ***
- FindWhat ***
- Yahoo Search Submit Express**
- Mamma **
- LookSmart **
- Kanoodle *
free submissions: submit your site for free to:
- Google ****
- MSN Search ***
- Open Directory **
- LookSmart*
For the highest paid traffic volume, consider Google Adwords and Yahoo's Sponsored Search. Between these two pay-per-click programs, you will cover the vast bulk of English language search traffic. Cost per click can be high for the most popular words, but there are many other search terms to bid on with reasonable per clicks charges.
The most cost effective combination is to submit to Google Search and Google Adwords - you can get almost instant traffic through Adwords pay-per-click search engine service and tap into the free traffic provided by Google Search within a few weeks.
Try out Marktleap's searchengine saturation tool to see how many of your web site's pages are already listed in their databases - you may be surprised!
Before you add your url to any search engine or directory, make sure that your web site is ready. Check your HTML & links is correct and try to optimize your web pages so that you can get the best ranking in the searches.
An excellent free tool to help you find the right key words to focus on is Good Keywords. You can download Good Keywords for free and look up all the combinations of search terms that included a certain key word, plus how many people searched for those terms in the previous month at Overture. With the 7Search results, you can even look up misspelled keywords. As a bonus, Good Keywords also provides information on the traffic and links to any URL on the web - analyze your own growth or watch your competitors!
Sign up for Google's Adwords have your ads displayed on other people's web pages that match the content of your ad. Adwords are also displayed on relevant Google Search result pages as "Sponsored ads."