Who Says You Gotta Pay to Get Listed?

Most search engines and directories charge for site review and submission, but you can still get listed free.

Yahoo!, like many other search engines and directories is now charging most website owners for inclusion in their directory and search results pages.

For years search engines and directories depended on the computing public to to submit sites. If all basic criteria was met, one could expect the search engine's crawler to index their site and within a short time the content of their site would be available to searchers.

Those days are gone... for most site owners.

Of course, with proper planning, you can still get tons of free traffic from search engines.

How? (you ask)...

Follow a few of these suggestions and all of the rules, and you will see you traffic pick up within a few weeks.

Rule 1. - don't use cloaking, URL redirection or other means to attempt to trick a search engine into indexing your site. Getting caught by one of the (automated) means of detection programming into the spidering and indexing engine may end up getting certain URLs delisted, or worse... blacklisted.

Rule 2. - don't use keyword spamming tricks like repeating every variation of certain keywords over and over in your pages. There is something called keyword density and if you exceed the typical number of occurrances of a keyword contained within X number of other words, your ranking drops. And forget the "same color text as background" tricks... it's one of the oldest in the book and will only earn you demerits in your over all rankings.

Rule 3. - be very aware of any words in a page that may trip a content filter. Saying S..E..X.. or F-R-E-E-! to many times, and sometimes only mentioning the "S" word once unintentionally can trip some filters. You must be careful even when used in proper context, ie- "...free clinic services for anyone with STD concerns at local hospital". Avoid the "S" word if your site is not an established authority, (ie- N.E. Journal of Medicine, DrKoop.com, etc..).

Rule 4. - check your HTML and links before the search engine does. Broken links, HTML errors and poor site design are probably the #1 reason a site doesn't get fully index. Web browsers are forgiving and may display the content reasonably well, but if a spider hits a broken link or gets lost in a HTML code error, it stoops indexing your site and leaves, (and give you overall site ranking demerits).

Rule 5. - have a site map that links to all pages you want indexed, and be sure the link to the site map can be easily found on your home page. Getting a spider to crawl your site map makes the job easy for the spider and gets you listed the way you want to be.