How to Submit to the Search Engines
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What was the first thing I did to promote my case study blog?
There are hundreds if not thousands of search engines although you wouldn’t really know it because most people are only concerned with 3, Google, MSN and Yahoo.
So the very first thing on my list once I had got a few articles on the blog was to submit it to the search engines, and in particular Google. At the end of the day everybody wants search engine traffic.
The reason for this being the first on the list is the Google sandbox effect, or in simple terms it can take a while for your posts to start appearing in the search results. So the sooner you submit your blog the sooner the process can start.
What is the best way to submit to Google?
Personally I think the best way to get Google to visit your blog, and quickly, is to use the Google XML sitemaps plugin for Wordpress.org blogs. This XML sitemap generator has also been adopted my MSN and Yahoo, and all 3 of these search engines regularly send their ‘bots’ to check my sites after using this plugin on both of my blogs. I know not everybody has a Wordpress blog but don’t worry I’ll get to that later.
To install it you just need to download the plugin and install it onto your wordpress installation, if you need any help doing this take a look at this article I wrote about installing themes and plugins. You can then track the progress of your sitemap by using Google Webmaster Tools.
Submitting RSS feeds to homepages
Another way to submit to search engines or to get them to send a ‘bot’ to your blog is adding your rss feed to the search engine personal homepage. If you set yourself up with a homepage on either Google, MSN or Yahoo then you will have the option to ‘add content’ to that page, that is where you can add the rss feed of your blog, once added the search engine bots will go check it out.
Use a submission service
There are a lot of these around some are free and some are paid for. I have only used this type of service once, a long time ago for this blog and I used a free service (although you could make a donation) called Self Promotion. I could choose which search engines I wanted to submit to and they did the rest.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Google, msn, self promotion, xml sitemap, yahooComments
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