Submit
Your URL to the Search Engines and Directories
Click here to see a comprehensive list of Search Engines and Internet Directories.
(All links go straight to the URL submission page for each search engine.)
As you've been following along so far in this series of articles about effectively promoting your creative works online, you have learned an easy and straight forward way of reaching out to potentially millions of previously untapped Internet users. And it appears that already the information you have been given can probably help you in some way. But nothing is as important as what you are about to learn in the next few articles on how to submit your Artopium URL to the search engines and Internet diretories and how to increase your link popularity. Pay close attention to the ideas in these next few pages as by following all the suggestions outlined you will begin to see how easy it is to get the results you want with just a little effort and patience.
If you have already searched for an "all-in-one" solution to submitting your URL (click the link to learn what a URL is) to the search engines, you have probably discovered that there are just about a gazillion websites on the Internet that will help with this. Some of these will submit to the top 10 or 15 search
engines for free, others will submit to thousands of FFA (Free For All)
sites. Some companies offer the service of manually submitting your
URL and maintaining and ensuring the quality (keywords, URL description,
etc.) of your submission to all the major search engines and directories
for a monthly or yearly fee. There are also software packages that you can
purchase and download that will help you submit your URL, although I advise
against using software. A manual submission is, by far, a better method
as it will guarantee a more optimal placement within the results.
Search engines and directories can receive thousands of submissions in a
day so they apply automated filtering techniques to narrow down the list
of accepted URLs. A lot of the big, and therefore important search
engines and directories will not accept URLs submitted by an automated service.
If you have the money, I highly recommend finding a company to do the submission
for you. Be sure they do it manually. Using a company that will write
the descriptions for your URL might be a good idea as well as they will
have a better understanding of current keyword trends and of which keywords
to use in your descriptions.
However, if you're like most artists and musicians I know, you probably don't have a lot of money to throw around on URL submission companies or software. In this case it's time to roll up your sleeves and invest a little time into submitting your URL to the various search engines and directories yourself. At first, this may seem like a tedious task, but once you get the hang of the first few submissions, you will quickly notice how easy the rest of the submissions go. And once you have submitted to as many search engines and directories as you can, you can simply sit back and relax. If you have done everything right, then you should only ever have to submit to a search engine once. After that, the amount of traffic that your listing in the search engine brings will be determined by how well you placed your keywords.
Some search engines can take
up to 6 months before your page is listed. If this is too long to wait, then you might want to consider paying for the submission directly
to the search engine or directory. Once again, you could pay a company
to do all this for you, but you will have more control over how your URL
is presented on each search engine by paying the search engine directly.
I highly recommend that if you have the money to go ahead and pay
Yahoo the $299 they require for being listed in their directory. Lots
of other search engines use the Yahoo directory for their content and
this one submission could mean having your URL appear on many other sites,
not to mention the amount of traffic you will generate from Yahoo alone.
However, not all of us can afford $299, let alone all the other search
engine's fees, so a free submission will have to do. If your page is formatted
neatly (such as your Artopium profile) and contains a sufficient amount
of useful and factual information such as text and images, your URL submission
will be accepted by the search engines and directories. You
must simply be patient! Re-submitting your URL over and over again is
the quickest way to get banned, and you NEVER WANT TO GET BANNED FROM
THE SEARCH ENGINES OR DIRECTORIES! Sometimes you must WAIT ALL SIX MONTHS! I'm serious about this. This is the number one mistake everyone
makes when submitting their URL.
Now that you have familiarized yourself with the concepts necessary, you are now ready to visit Artopium's List of Search Engines and
Directories to personally and manually submit your Artopium URL. Be sure to submit to every single search engine
and directory in the list in order to maximize your exposure on the first
go-around. Some of these sites will accept you right away, and with others
you may have to wait up to 6 months. Since there is no way for you to
know which search engines or directories will accept your URL immediately
and which ones will make you wait, it is better to submit
to all of them on the first go-around.
Continue to the next section: Getting to Know Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
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