Search engine registration request, the "professional vackground" and other issues are a serious issue that will affect the eventual profitability of your web site. There are many advisory services available about these systems. In general, if it is free, it is usually wrong. We pay about $600 a quarter to get reliable information (exlcuding our staff time). Getting a succesful listing is not easy today. Once it was free, today you can spend thousands. Still you can get success. However, we suggest you talk to one of our Internet consultants. They will be able to advise you were your dollars are best spent.

Search and Listing Services Defined

What are the "major" search engines and the lessor known but still valuable search engines? Which similar general listing services are appropriate to use to notify people on the Internet that your business is present. Finally, how do you become listed on these search engines? The majors are the main service groups that we list you with when you use the standard (hyperlinks included).

If you selcted our sedign or rregistration service, the others are some of the extended services we list you with. We also list you with industry specific listing services which, due to the sheer number of them, are not listed below.

If you have not selected one of our registration or consulting services, please feel free to use the links provided on this page to inform them yourself. Since add links change frequently, in most cases, we have not included specific locations. Use the link and then find the "add URL" option. If you don't see one, find the help link and follow it. In general, either of these will work. Follow the service's directions from that point.

If OfficeOnWeb did not design your pages or is not your marketing consultant, remember to optimize all pages for various search engines. Each page should have some form of targeting toward a particular engine. Currently, the classifications are A, B. and C engines. That way, your web site will have a better chance on showing up in a favorable position on more that one search engine. What is a targeted page? A targeted page is designed, to a certain extent, to meet an individual search engine's characteristics. These change often and are closely guarded secrets of the search engine company. However, some people have spent the time to map out some of their characteristics, and that knowledge helps the designer and web site owner better market their web site to the customer. You should ALWAYS only use descriptions that actually refer to the page content. Something to know about search engines are that some engines like Excite favor pages with keywords in the title tag and keywords repeated frequently in the whole document. The best way to optimize your page for Lycos is to include your keywords in the title tag, then repeat them again in a heading tag, the best length being about 400 words. However, this will undoubtedly get that page a "spam" label in Infoseek. As for AltaVista, it ranks better with search terms appearing in the title, with no meta tags, the first few lines of the page, near each other and frequently in the document. Remember that AltaVista and Infoseek are sensitive to capitalization, but Excite and Lycos are not. Although there are differences between the engines they also share certain characteristics like favoring web pages that have keywords or search terms in the header (H1 tag). These rules do not apply to listing services such as Yahoo. They use real people to examine the web site and for commercial sites require a fee, regardless of acceptance or denial. If you have less than ten-pages, you are probably better off to not attempt some of them. For them, professional appearance, entertainment value, and company significance are serious issues.

Search Engines

The Majors:
Excite, HotBot, Open Text Web Index, REX Skyline, Go Network, Google, Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, Web Crawler

Others:
G.O.D., Magellan, Planet Search, National Directory

Listing Services

The Majors:
Yahoo, InfoSpace, SwitchBoard, USA Online, NewHoo, Northern Light

Others:
BizCardz Business Directory, BizWeb, BizWiz, ComFind, Info Highway, Jayde Online Directory, LinkMonster, LinkStar, LookSmart, JumpCity, JumpLink, PeekABoo, ProNet, SmartBiz Starups, Starting Point, WebVenture, Web 100, WhatUSeek, where2Go, World On-line Digest, World Wide Business Sserv, WWW Worm, YelloWWWeb, Yellow Pages.com, Your WebScout, Subjex

The above are the current list we request registration for our clients at the completion of the marketing installation and Quality Assurance review. These in turn are used as sources for registration on many other major services. The total number of services affected exceed 50, and according to research services, more than 99.8% of searches from a service begin through these 50+ services. No search engine or listing services guarantees acceptance for indexing. It will take up to three months on most search engines to attain indexing and six months to attain a position. Patience is a virtue here. Further, we strongly advise against only using a search engine as your marketing effort. Additional effort is required. After three months of the completion of the requests, use of an AIM or similar marketing program is advised. Multiple submissions to search engines within too frequent a time period will cause your site to NOT be accepted and may cause the removal of pages already indexed. The time delay required varies widely and changes constantly. If desired, our Marketing staff can assist. If you would prefer to make submissions yourself, we highly recommend subscribing some high quality search engine e-zines and examining some of our assistance pages.

Enjoy the success of the Internet. :-)