Part III

Adding Your Site to the Indexes and Directories

In this part . . .

Getting your Web site indexed by the search engines and directories should be easy. Let them know the URL and wait for them to add it, right? Wrong. Sure, you can submit information about your site to the search engines, but they probably won’t index it.

In this part, I explain how to get your site into the major search engines (hint: You need to make it easy for the search engines to find your site on their own) and tell you about a special kind of sitemap that helps the major search engines index your site. I also explain how to work with the two major search directories: Yahoo! (easy; just pay) and the Open Directory Project (easy to submit, and free, but you may never get in!).

This part also tells you how to find important but lesser known systems and how they can help you. Sure, most searches are carried out through the major systems, but the specialized systems can often provide valuable, highly targeted traffic, as well as valuable links pointing back to your site.

And for those of you selling products, you find out about the shopping directories — specialized systems that index commercial products (and, in a few cases, services) — from Google Product Search and eBay, to Amazon, Shopping.com, and Yahoo! Shopping. If you’re selling online, you must know about these systems.