How to earn from Blogs, Easy blog Earn Money , Earn Money From Blog, Make Money From Your Blog, $$: How do you bring traffic to your site?

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. -- Beverly Sills

Search engines are Internet directories, designed to make your site easy to find and easily accessible to Internet users (a link to your site is included with each directory listing). Without your listing in search engines, it would be like conducting business in a community and not being listed in the telephone book. And, if your website isn't located in the top-20 listings of the major search engines, chances are your site will rarely be seen.

According to recent users surveys, between 84% to 92% of Internet users worldwide use Search Engines to find what they're looking for on the Web. Its been estimated there are over 400,000,000 (four hundred million) searches performed using search engines, daily.
A CommerceNet/Nielsen Media Research survey reveals search engines are overwhelmingly the No. 1 Web-navigation instrument—with 71% of frequent users saying they find out about sites they want to reach through search engines." (The Quickest Way to Get More Visitors to Your Site Annette Hamilton, Executive Producer ZDNet AnchorDesk, July 21, 1997.)
Numerous studies have shown the Top Ways Websites are Discovered are:
Search Engines: 46%
Random Surfing: 20%
Word-of-mouth: 20%
Magazine ads: 4.4%
"By accident": 2.1%
TV spots: 1.4%
Targeted email: 1.2%
Banner ads: 1%
Nine out of ten web users visit a search engine, portal or community site each month. They also revisit frequently, nearly five times per month. (Nielsen//NetRatings, May 2001)

Given the above statistics it should be obvious if you want your website to be found, it's imperative to submit your site to the major search engines.

What are the important Search Engines to be listed in?

While there are many search engines on the Internet, getting listed on the most popular search engines will generate the most traffic to your Web site. An effective search engine marketing strategy leverages the advantages of each of the major search engines and their advertising channels including natural and paid.

Over 90% of search engine traffic comes from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These three search engines provide results for many other search engines, and if you are listed on these three search engines, your site will be listed on many other search engines too. AltaVista for example gets their search results from Yahoo. AOL and Netscape use Google and also get some results from Open Directories like DMOZ.

Do you want to work hard? Or would you prefer to work smart? The smart way is to not waste allot of time submitting to the multitude of smaller search engines... rather focus your attention on the most popular search engines. If there are local or specialized directories related to your web site, those too should be targeted for your submissions.

Following are some of the most popular search engines:

A note about Meta Search Engines
Meta search engines do not use their own databases and do not index websites. They query your search from many different search engines simultaneously and merge together the results into one unified set of results. For example, MetaCrawler may take your search term and compile its reults from About, Ask Jeeves, FAST, FindWhat, LookSmart, Overture and many more. Some other popular meta seach engines include: Ask Jeeves, Dog Pile, SurfWax, and Profusion
Getting listed in a meta search engine requires your site to have been indexed by the search engines it pulls its results from. Therefore, it is important to get a good ranking in the search engine databases used by the meta search engine.

How to Submit Your Site to Search Engines

Before we discuss the different ways of submitting to search engines, you should first make sure your web site is READY to be submitted. Here are some suggestions for being prepared:

Make sure your site is completed.
Fix all broken links. Have all pages completed. Make sure it loads properly and quickly. If you want get another opionion on whether it is ready to be submitted. Here is a good company that validates websites: http://www.htmlvalidator.com/
Find the correct category to be listed under.
If the search engine you're submitting to has categories, it's important to choose the right one. Although this can be frustrating it is important to take the time to find the correct category and sub-category for your site to be listed under. Choosing the wrong category could result in your site being denied.
Write an acceptable description of your site.
You need to keep it to 2 sentences and nothing more. If you have any doubts about how to write a good description go to your category and look at the descriptions of sites already listed.

There are three basic models to getting - and staying - listed on search engines:

Do it all yourself:
You can familiarize yourself with the major search engines, and submit your site to them yourself. This is the least expensive option, but it can also be very time consuming. Besides making sure you get listed the first time, you will also need to monitor your position on the search engines weekly or monthly to be certain you don't get bumped down the list or knocked off completely.

You'll also want to learn a lot about the ins and outs of search engines and directories. A good place to start is at Search Engine Watch, a very useful source of information about various search engines.

Use the following links to submit your site to some of the major search engines.

MSN
AOL

Google
DMOZ

Yahoo

TIP: A common mistake many make is to only submit their "home" page to the search engines even though they might have dozens of subpages dealing with a variety of subjects. Some search engines only require you to submit your index or home page and they will eventually spider your entire site. But, others do not. So, you want to find out if the particular search engine you're submitting to spiders all your pages or not. If not, you will want to submit every page. Each page in your site should have a unique title that is short and describes the content of the page. Further, you want to create meta tags for each page with those unique titles.

TIP: Locating and making the submissions to the search engines will take time. And, the process doesn't stop after making the initial submission. It is important to monitor your placement in the search engines because for any number of reasons, your site might be dropped from their index or your placement in their rankings is so poor that nobody can find you. Generally speaking, you will probably want to submit your pages to search engines and directories every month. Don't submit more often, though, as you might be punished if the search engine believes you are spamming them. But, once a month is generally pretty safe.

TIP: After you have submitted your site, it may take several days, weeks, or even months before your page shows up in their listings. As much as you might like to think of the web as being instant - when it comes to most search engines - it ain't so - unless you know the tricks of getting your site included faster.

Use an automated submission service:
You might call this "do it yourself, with a bit of help." Several online services will submit your Web site to search engines for you. They can save you a lot of time and teach you things as well. They've already done the work of gathering forms from dozens or hundreds of different engines, and have them all in one place.

WebPosition Gold is a web marketing tool we whole-heartedly recommend to our clients. Unlike other products out there, this amazing tool really does help you achieve top rankings on the search engines!

Search Engine Blaster is a very simple to use online based service with no complicated software to learn and nothing to download. Once you tell it what to submit, it will automatically re-submit as often as you'de like. You don't even have to log in to do it--It's all on auto-pilot!

There are also some free or very low cost submission services including:
SelfPromotion.com is a resource for do-it-yourselfers where you can learn to prepare your pages for the search engines, then use a sophisticated url submission robot to submit your webpages to all the important search engines and directories. You'll also find tutorials about website promotion, submitting to yahoo, and much more. Best of all, you can use the site for free -- if you like it, pay what YOU think it's worth! The guy who runs it has reinvented tipping!
HitBox Site Submission

There is also automated software you install on your local computer which you use to automatically submit your site.
See for example:
Exploit Submission Wizard
Hire someone to manage the process for you:
If you want to avoid the time and hassle altogether, there are firms that will manage the entire process for you for a fee. Data Synthesis can optimize your web page and submit your website to hundreds of search engines and directories. Two plans are offered: One can intially submit your site to 150+ search engines and directories and then resubmit your site quarterly. Another plan will make a one-time submission of your site.
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