1. Beware of Fast and Easy Solutions

I get spam emails every day from companies that for {insert dollar amount here} will submit my website to hundreds of thousands of sites and "guarantee" tons of traffic back. Traffic = Sales. Sales = Commissions. All I have to do is write them a SMALL check and then sit back and wait for my sponsors to write me the BIG checks!! Does it work?

There are probably 10 search engines that you REALLY want your site placed on (including the Big Sites listed below,) which leaves a few hundred thousand that probably aren't going to do you much good. One class of useless sites (at least useless for driving good product-buying traffic to your pages!) are called FFA's, which stands for "Free For All." The name says it all.

The idea behind an FFA is that they take ANYbody's link! (Does anybody ever go back and read the links on one of these pages?) regardless of your site's content. FFA sites also have a reputation for being used as an email address farm: whoever submits a page to an FFA page is going to get a LOT of "commercial email" (SPAM) back in return. My advice is: if you submit to those pages, make sure you use a spare email address other than your main email, to keep the spam out of your main business account.

Save yourself the expense of using a submission service (take the money and go have a nice dinner on the town!) and submit your site yourself! It's going to take a while for your site to be spidered by the search engines (we'll talk more about that later) but if your site is well written and nicely designed for ease of use, the traffic will come to you. Just make sure that your pages are ready to be seen by the search engines before you submit.

You can use this list (and the advice coming later in this series) to build up a long-term plan for building traffic to your site, with little or no $$ investment (the pay site submissions start under $20/year/website! You decide if your site is worth the $$ or just stick with the freebies!)

Here's a list of addresses to go to when you're ready to submit your site to the engines:

Google (also powers the AOL search, iWon, and some of Yahoo) www.google.com/addurl.html

AllTheWeb http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Yahoo (how to suggest your site. Note that some of Yahoo searches are powered by Google) Paid submissions for adult sites on Yahoo is VERY expensive! See if it's possible to get picked up by them first, through a free submission. http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

AskJeeves and Teoma (this is a pay-for-submission - read the docs carefully on how they handle adult content sites.) http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/addjeeves/submit.html

Inktomi (they power MSN, HotBot, and Overture searches) http://www.inktomi.com/services/web_search/submit.html (this is a paid search placement. Read their docs carefully on how they handle sites with adult content.)

Lycos (they also power alltheweb) This is a paid submission that starts under $20 per year per site for guaranteed inclusion in their index (read their documentation carefully for information on how they handle adult sites.) http://insite.lycos.com/searchservices/

We will touch on more of the smaller/niche search sites later. If you'd like more information on the whole art and science of search engine placement, we suggest SEARCH ENGINE WATCH: they offer a FREE email newsletter on the latest changes in search engine technology and business, and more in-depth information with their paid subscriptions. Check it out! http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/

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