Register your site with search engines

You can help visitors find your site by registering or submitting it to a search engine, such as Lycos, HotBot, Alta Vista, or Excite.

There are four steps to registering your site with search engines:

Decide which page or pages you want visitors to find.

This is the page your visitors will see when they click the link to your site from the search engine's listing of found sites. (If you want more than one page found by a search engine, you must perform all steps for each page.)

Enter the keywords that Web surfers can use to find your site, and enter a summary description of your site.

Keywords are the words or phrases that Web surfers search on to find sites. You enter the keywords for your site on the Fields tab of the Page Properties dialog box. Separate the keywords with commas and spaces; for example, keywords for a site about skiing could include: ski, skiing, snowboarding, cross country skiing, cross country skiing, slalom.

The summary is the brief description of your site that is displayed with the link to your site in the search engine's listing of found sites. You also enter the summary on the Fields tab of the Page Properties dialog box.

After publishing your site your site, note the URL for the page you want to register with the search engines.

To find the URL, open your browser and go to the page on the published site that you want found by the search engines. The URL of this page is displayed near the top of your browser's window. For example, in Netscape and Internet Explorer, the URL is displayed in the Address box.

The search engine will want the exact and complete URL for this page. If you want to copy this information, select the URL and then press Ctrl+C. You can then paste the URL in search engine's application form using the Edit > Paste command or Ctrl+V.

Ask the search engines of your choice to add your site to their list of sites.

The search engine's home page (for example, www.altavista.com or www.lycos.com) generally has a link that takes you to a form that you complete to register your site with the search engine. The wording of the link varies from search engine to search engine; for example, :

Add your site to . . .
Add a URL
Add URL
How to suggest a site
Submit Web site

The location of the link is often at the bottom of the search engine's home page, but can be anywhere on the page.

Tips for increasing the search engine's ranking of your site:

Make sure the page has at least 150 to 300 words of content.
Make sure that the page's content includes the important keywords and key phrases.
The content should consist of normal sentences that use the keywords. Lists of keywords or words repeated over and over may be seen as spam by the search engine and may not be included in the search results. Your most important keyword(s) should appear in the first sentence.
When you're entering the keywords, enter them in order of importance. Do not capitalize keywords. In general, it's not helpful to include keywords unless they also appear in the content of your page, with one exception: you may want to include common misspellings of the keywords.
Use a couple of the most important keywords in the page's title.
For the site summary, write one or two sentences that describe the site, and be sure to use your most important keywords. Again, do not list the keywords as the summary.

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Notes

If you publish your site using frames, each page has an URL for the main content of the page and URLs for each frame. Make sure to submit the URL of the page content for the search engine. To find this URL, go to the page in your browser, then click the page area and use the displayed URL.
If you are familiar with the HTML META tags, when you publish your Web site, the Keyword, Summary, and Author fields in the Page Properties dialog box are converted to <META NAME="keywords" Content="[keyword field]">, <META NAME="description" Content="[summary field]">, and <META NAME="author" Content="[author field]">, respectively.
Don't worry about using frames and being found by search engines. When you publish your Web site, CuteSITE Builder creates HTML tags that ensure that search engines can see your site.