Part of every webmaster's job will be submitting their creations to search engines. Even if you are not a digital librarian directly responsible for submitting your library's site to search engines you may find a buried treasure on the internet that you wish was a whole lot easier to find than it turned out to be. Many librarians then feel this mild case of OCD trying to understand if there is some form of corrective indexing or cataloging you can do to help others more easily find this information in the future. Well yes there is, you can submit these hidden websites to search engines. I found myself wishing that I had thought, or been told to, do this simple step with some of my library class projects.
Submitting a site to a search engine is about more than finding that site. If you prepare a site well enough before submission your site can be listed in the top 10 search results for your relevant keywords – this has become the best way to gain traffic to your sit; beating out some of the classics such as banner advertising.
There are several apparent ways to achieve comprehensive URL submission after first googling the problem. There are a myriad of websites out there, including a good many free ones, which will do this for you. They will submit your site from anywhere from 10-400 search engines. Sounds awesome right? Not really, first of all when looking through these you rarely learned all of the search engines that you would be submitting to. Secondly, these sites did not usually specify how they were submitting your site (many search engines will only take certain kinds of submissions) so there was no way of checking to see if your site was being submitted in a way that actually worked. Finally, many of these sites attempt to submit your site over and over again. This is called spamming your site, and actually gets it blocked or ranked lower in many search engines. Once again it is difficult if not impossible to tell which submission service do this, and which do not. So like many things in life, it turns out that if you want to do this properly, you ought to do it yourself.
Whenever I have read about site submission previously, it has always been written about hand in hand with SEO, or search engine optimization. If you don't know what this is, it is the idea of promoting your site by having it appear near, if not at, the top of the results list when someone types in a relevant search query. It is true that submitting your site is the final step of the SEO process (likely why it is mentioned there), but this process is only something that can really be controlled if you have access to your website's base HTML code. People who have used turnkey solutions, blogs, or have some other sort of preformatted web site you want to submit not have the ability to affect this process in the traditional way. However you may have something in your authoring or control panel that will allow you do things like choose your keywords for your articles – this does filter down into SEO. The main point here though is that I had thought that I would need the traditional information compiled for SEO in order to submit my site. This is not true, you only need your site's URL, and to occasionally prove you are not a robot.
So now you're ready to submit to search engines, but which search engines do you want to submit to, and how many are you going to submit to? Part of this answer is obvious. If you only want to submit to one engine, by far the most popular search engine in the world is Google. So if nothing else you should submit here. The next question to ask is how global you want your website to be. It is true that Google by itself takes care of the majority of that too; however there are certain countries where Google is not the top search engine. These are: Yahoo! (Japan), Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), Naver (South Korea), and Seznam (Czech Republic). Next you may want to consider including the runner-ups in your list as well, after all if you include Yahoo! and Bing, you already have the majority of that list covered. There were several search engines that were originally on my list which I ended up excluding because they either: directly used the search results of another search engine already on my list, or did not accept URL submissions at all- they get all of their data directly from their crawling bots. The only way to get included on the latter type of search engines is to ensure that other sites have links that will lead them to your site. Perhaps the best way to do this is to create social media splash pages, or a Wikipedia entry. After all is said and done I ended up with the list below.
· Baidu – Baidu Submit
· Bing – Bing Submit
· Daum – Daum Submit
· DMOZ Open Directory Project – DMOZ Submit*
· Google – Google Submit
· Naver – Naver Submit
· Seznam – Seznam Submit
· Qihoo 360 Search – Qihoo 360 Search Submit
· Yahoo! - Yahoo! Submit
· Yandex – Yandex Submit
*Unlike the other links this is not the actual submission page, but the submission guidelines and instruction page. To submit properly on DMOZ you have to go directly to the most appropriate category for your page to be filed under and then click on the submit URL link at the bottom of that category's page.
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