Submission to the Search Engines and Directories

How to increase blog traffic without financial investments (part 3)

In the first two parts we discussed the tips and recommendations, related to the content preparation and presentation on your blog, as the basis for the successful site exposure. If the content is not very good, or has not been properly presented, there is no point investing in the advanced marketing steps. Even if you can attract the one-time readers, they will never be converted to your fans and returning visitors. "Content is a king", but if you will not be able to spread a world about it around, nobody knows that you have a "treasure".

You can access the first two parts of this publication through the following links:

http://webfreebies4u.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-increase-blog-traffic-without.html

http://webfreebies4u.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-increase-blog-traffic-without_13.html

In the third part of this research (I just approached to it as one of my college papers), we will review the marketing promotional techniques, related to the blog submission to the Search Engines and Directories, notifying the potential readers on your virtual presence and on the following blog updates per your fresh posts. Coming to the point of this part preparation, I got stuck. The amount of the information about the related services on the Web is enormous, and the new players are coming to the market on a daily basis. It is a good sign, confirming that this area of interests is really “hot”, and we are at the right place at the right time. So, let's use the free Internet opportunities for our own profits.

To make the article more flexible and let the readers leave their valuable inputs on the listed services, I have posted most of the services that will be mentioned below as Web Lists at RateItAll Rating Community (http://www.rateitall.com). This way, the listings might be updated without modifying this post. I will be also grateful, if you raise your voice to vote for your favorite services on the presented Web Lists.


Submission to the General Search Engines

First of all, let’s treat our blog as a regular Web Page. If so, we can simply submit it to the major search engines. It is obvious, that the high percentage of the traffic, coming to the blogs, is originated from Search Engines. If your blog is parked in one of the communities, the host will submit your pages to the Search Engines for you. However, you hardly can control and boost the process of submission. If you want to take this matter in your own hands, you can independently submit your blog to the search engines. As my promotion approach does not suggest any payable solutions, I am offering you to choose one of the free automatic submission Web Sites, which will do the job for you in no time. The quality of the promotion outcomes is questionable, but due to a small amount of time spent, you have nothing to loose. There is a small list of the available Web Sites, I have prepared for your convenience at RateItAll:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24359-automatic-web-site-submission-to-search-engines--free-online-services.aspx

Yes, the easy and fast submission option, described above, exists, but I would not recommend using it for the most valuable Search Engines, where you expect most of the traffic from. You can get much better results, if you submit your blog manually, as some crawler based engines do not like getting the submission from the automatic sources. Besides, most of the Web traffic currently is coming from the few leading engines, anyway. Just spend little bit more time to ensure your submission efforts will get you the best possible results. I suggest performing your blog submission to the following top engines and directories manually:
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html - Yahoo!
http://www.google.com/addurl/ - Google, AOL, NetScape, iWon.
http://dmoz.org/add.html - Open Directory.

Submission to the Blog Directories

There are so many different search engines and directories, created exclusively for blogs. I am not even thinking to cover them all. If you wish to use automatic blog and RSS submission software to the multiple directories, consider buying Dummy Software's Blog and RSS Submit Software http://www.dummysoftware.com. The software is a shareware, but it can be tested for free on limited amount of the sites for submission. Establishing your presence in Blog directories will increase your link popularity, amplify the Blog direct traffic, and improve search engine rankings. I have prepared the appropriate list of the best Blog directories on RateItAll:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24360-submission-to-blog-directories--free-online-services.aspx

Submission to the RSS Search EnginesFast increasing number of the content sources caused appearing new distribution channels to the public. RSS is one of them, as more and more advanced Internet users utilize RSS newsreaders and aggregators to keep themselves informed on the latest news and posted information. As there are increasing amount of the RSS consumers, the Blog owner should invest some additional time on giving them ability to access the blog posts through RSS Search Engines. If until now, online content was optimized solely for SEO (search engine optimization), a growing popularity of RSS requires additional site optimization for RSS readers. Usually, the submission process for the RSS search engines is fast and easy. On most sites it is limited by posting the RSS feeder URL from your Blog without registration or filling much information on their sites. The list of selected RSS search engines is posted on RateItAll:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24374-submission-to-rss-search-engines--free-online-services.aspx

Submission to the Social Bookmarking Sites

The original and the main purpose of the social bookmarking sites is ability to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages, similarly to saving bookmarks in your browser. The difference is that you can access the social bookmarking sites from any computer, and easily share them with your friends and colleagues. In addition, these sites are actively used for blog promotion, similarly to the blog directories, increasing the potential value for the blog owners. All the sites require membership to access their services. The list of the best selected social bookmarking services is posted on RateItAll:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24375-social-bookmarking-sites--free-online-services.aspx

You might not need to subscribe to all the services currently available currently, choosing only those that will provide you set of features you like.

Pinging Blogs

Pinging services are specializing on updating the various search engines and social bookmarking sites on the Blog recent updates. Blog owners are interested in getting the widest possible publicity to the newly posted data as fast as possible. Therefore, the bulk pinging services will be handy to fulfill this task. The list of the best multi-ping services, I could find, is posted, as usual, on RateItAll:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24378-blog-pinging--free-online-services.aspx

To be continued…