GMChost.com Webmaster Guide

Many people believe that submitting a Web site is as simple as typing the URL into a search engine's submission form and pressing the "submit" button. However, the way you perform the actual search engine submission will help determine whether your Web site achieves top 10 rankings for keyword searches or if your site joins the land of the lost.

Technique #1: The first technique attempts to capitalize on a growing search engine preference. Some major search engines are scoring pages higher that were found by a search engine spider instead of having been individually submitted by someone. Therefore, you may be able to boost your site's rankings by creating what we call a "hallway" page.

A "hallway" page is a page that has links to all your different "optimized" pages you've optimized for each search engine. When this hallway page is submitted to a search engine, the search engine's spider travels down the page and branches off to these links indexing those pages you really want indexed. In theory, the pages it spidered will rank higher than the hallway page and higher than they would if they were submitted individually.

Therefore, be wary of submission programs that employ "deep promotion" or a similar term whereby all pages on the site are submitted at once. This can potentially cause a lower ranking by submitting the URL directly, and on some engines will definitely cause you to exceed their daily limits of how many URLs they will accept per day from a single domain. (Luckily, WebPosition Gold's Submitter will track your submissions per day, and warn you before you exceed known submission limits.)

(New readers: Optimized pages are simply pages that you've optimized to rank well on one or more search terms for each search engine. Optimized pages act as alternate entrances, or "optimizeds" to your Web site. Because search engines index many pages of a Web site, not everyone will find your Web site through your home page.)

We know that many major engines now rank home pages higher than other pages, all other things being equal. Therefore, my feeling is that you'll do better if you add these hallway page links to your home page versus a sub-page. This effectively makes your home page the hallway page to the rest of your site and to your optimized pages.

For even more leverage, place your hallway page on a separate domain that you own and submit it. This way you'll realize two benefits:

The only drawback to not submitting your URLs directly is that you're dependent on the spider to traverse the links and find your other pages. They often put a lower priority on this; therefore it could take longer for you to get indexed than if you'd submitted the URLs directly. However, the wait can be worth it, particularly if you're in a competitive industry and need any extra boost you can get.

Tip: Make use of the URL Verification feature in WebPosition Gold's Reporter to make sure your optimized pages get indexed in a reasonable amount of time. If they don't, either re-submit the hallway page, or submit the individual pages separately as a last resort.

Technique #2: If you plan on using hallway pages to point to your different site pages and optimized pages, make the hyperlink (the underlined text you click on) a keyword. This can sometimes increase your rankings even more. For example, if you sell "blue widgets" and own two domains, one called www.DomainA.com and another called www.DomainB.com, place a link to DomainB from a hallway page on DomainA like this:

<a href="http://www.DomainB.com/webpage.htm">blue widgets</a>

Some search engines will recognize that another site is linking to www.DomainB.com using the targeted keyword phrase "blue widgets" as the hyperlink. The search engine logically concludes that www.DomainB.com has something to do with blue widgets, and therefore will rank the page higher for that term.