Are you listed

Getting listed on a search engine is one of the black arts of the internet industry. There seem to be hundreds of companies offering top search engine placements on hundreds of search engines. Obviously this is all offered at a price. In my opinion there is no sure way to get a listed on a search engine.

Next time you are tempted to spend money on getting your site listed on a search engine it might be worth thinking about the following questions:

How many search engines do you use when you surf the internet?
I use two possibly three at the most. The main one I use is 'Google', I occasionally use 'Yahoo' and sometimes I use 'Ask Jeeves' as my girlfriend thinks it's the best.

Are there really hundreds of search engines worth being listed on?
There do seem a lot of search engines but if you haven't heard of them have your customers?

Is your site listed anywhere already?
You might find that you web site is already listed. It's worth checking on the search engines you use to see whether your site is listed. If you have logs for your web site check them regularly to see whether the search spiders and robots are visiting your site.

Are you a member of a professional organisation?
If you are check their web site to see if you can get a free listing. The organisations site is likely to get indexed by the top search engines regularly. Who knows perhaps your customers will use this site as their starting point.

What websites do you use regularly when researching your business area?
Perhaps you can get listed on one of these. If you use these websites for research maybe your customers do too.

There are number of simple ways you can improve you websites appeal to search engines:

Does it adhere to current web standards?
Search engines like valid HTML in fact web browsers like valid HTML. It loads faster and makes the pages easier to index.

Does it have relevant content?
Make sure the content of you site is relevant to you field. Make sure you use HTML text for any copy on your site. If you use nicely laid out copy that has been saved from a graphics programme as a nice looking image there is a no way for the search engine spiders to understand what the images is saying Avoid using flash for important content.

Do your images you use 'alt' tags?
The 'alt' tag is a way of describing the image as text within you HTML page providing away for the content of the images used on your web site to be described to search engine spiders.

If you want to find out more about getting your site listed check out the following links:

These pages describe the best ways of submitting a site to Google and how Google works.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

This is a forum about search engine optimisation - you have any questions about the subject you might they have already been answered here.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/

Add your site to dmoz. This is an open source directory whose data is used by a number of the larger commercial search engines.
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html