making a website known to search engines

[Madge2]

Largely thanks to CTH moderators and contributors, I have at last completed a site for my friend. Now I want to make it known to search engines.

My last employers used a placement agency who, I thought, did a good job for a very reasonable price, but my friend does not wish to pay a fee yet as she is already struggling with start-up costs for her tiny business, which may or may not flourish.

I know the principle of meta tags but maybe not how to get the best results out of them.

I am aware that there are many other ways to publicise a site and am investigating them. For example, link-swapping would be appropriate in her case.

My question: can anyone recommend an up-to-date website or book which gives easily digestible advice to the cyber-subliterate? I have a dozen or more books on web design but they are either out of date, cater for larger corporations in a competitive market, or are overwhelmingly USA orientated. (My friend is selling a unique product from a rural area in England, so she has no direct competition. She just needs to tell people she is there).

[NealM]

I would suggest that your friend registers her site with Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves etc.

For Yahoo go to the bottom of the home page and click on the "suggest a site" link.

For Google go to the "About Google" link from the home page and then click on the "Submitting your site" link.

For Ask Jeeves go to "About" at the bottom of the home page

[Spider]

Since there is a multitude techniques for this and it's something you want to tackle on your
own I would suggest getting started by loading google and search for SEO and
search engine optimization and submit site se and submit url search engine.

Google and other SE's (Search Engines) have submission pages...
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
...but if your page code is not properly constructed then when the SE "spiders" and "crawlers" visit your
url it will not add the pages to the SE index (you won't get added to the SE).

The quickest way to get an idea how to code your page properly is to search in an SE for the same
type of site you have. So if your a plumber and sell plumbing supplies and services then search for
those terms and look at the source code for the top 3 or 4 sites that result from your key words
and key phrases.

[V2.0]

I have found, through hours of searching, a pretty decent way to submit a site to various search engines, for free. Those engines include Google, Exactseek, Entireweb, and 11 others.

Go to http://www.addme.com (http://www.addme.com/), there, you will find a link called, "Free Search Engine Submission."
All you have to do is follow instructions. I believe 4 out of the total 14 will require you to validate through email.

They also offer a cheap way to submit to 1500 engines. Read info below:
(the link to this is called Professional Search Engine Submission )

Feature and Benefit Details:
Search Engine Submission Details: We will submit your site once a month to our 1500 search engines, announcement services and classifieds for one year. Also, with one click, you can resubmit your site any time you want. For example, if you are updating your site often, we let you re-submit every time you change your site. Every submission produces a detailed report on the results.

Page Analyzer: Find out immediately if there are problems that will keep your site from being listed. Our spider analyzes your site for 60 common mistakes that stop sites from being listed or hurt your ranking. These issues were derived from analysis of millions of web pages. It's amazing.

Link Checker: NEVER submit a site with broken links. Search engines penalize you for this and if you have too many broken links, you'll be dropped from the listing. Get unlimited access to our broken link checker.

Meta Tag Generator (free without purchase): Major search engines rely on the information in your meta tags to determine your ranking.

Confirmation Reports: Unlike other services, every time we submit your site, we create a customized web page for you on the submission results. This will show you if any problems have occurred during the submission process. We keep you notified of your > search engine submission results.

Prices:
http://www.submitter.net/addme/siteimages/transparent.gif


Pricing is by the number of URLs you want to submit. All prices are in U.S. dollars. All prices include the use of the site analyzer and broken link checker services.

Number of URLs(one time submission)
1 $29.95
3 $59.95
5 $ 89.95
10 $ 149.95
Number of URLs(12 Monthly Submissions Plus Submissions on Demand)
1 $ 49.95
3 $ 99.95
5 $ 149.95
10 $ 249.95

I hope this helps!