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The Act Of SubmissionI'd been dreading the moment for weeks, and here it was: the moment when I submitted my Web site to the world. I started my site, Lighthouse on the Web, essentially as an archive and reference tool just for readers of this column - and with less than a million mostly Victorian members, the Age readership is by Web standards an exclusive club. Now I felt the need to join the vast global race that is the Web site promotion game. Suddenly, I confronted the challenge of being judged by the small group of people who run the major surf sites and jumping-off points around the World Wide Web. At the same time, I prepared to enter a giant global game of chance. Web site promotion is an intimidating mix of cut-throat competition and cross-border crapshoot. The Cut-Throat Competition ...Chief among the judges sit the teams of hired selectors and categorizers who run the giant Web catalogues. Those catalogues extend from the generally non-judgmental, such as Yahoo!, to the very selective, such as NetGuide. Yahoo! simply requires sites to meet a threshhold standard imposed by its experts. NetGuide and its kin are giant lists of '"cool sites"', the competition you have to match to get your site noticed. Submitting to some of these sites requires nerve. Against the best in a large category like Web design, containing many sites I admire, I had long wondered whether my Lighthouse site would measure up. Even the relatively non-judgmental Yahoo! recently listed 298 sites on Web page design and layout, most of them alphabetically arranged (moral of the story: this site would be better publicised if it was called Aardvark on the Web). If your site covers a large topic - be it parenthood, stamp collecting or feminist philosophy - you too will face hefty competition. Even if you think you have something unique to offer, an extra few weeks' work might improve your site enough to catch the site examiners' collective eye. But the speed of the Web's growth makes delay a dangerous impulse. The sooner you're up there, the sooner people will start seeing you, linking to you and generating feedback. You do, though, need to carefully consider how to describe your site in a few well-chosen sentences. Essentially, you're writing print advertising copy - words designed to make people '"consume" your site just as good ads persuade people to consume products. This written '"advertising'" serves two purposes. Search facilities such as Yahoo ask you to submit a site using a form which asks you for a written site description. But many other search facilities rely in part of analysis of a piece of code you can include in your page - code called a <meta> tag. (The only prominent search engine to disregard meta tags is Excite, which argues they allow webmasters, especially commercial ones, to misrepresent their sites.) The meta tag, also available through many no-code Web publishing programs, allows you to write a description and list some '"keywords"'. Neither description nor keywords will appear in visitors' browsers, but search engines will see them, and the Northern Webs tutorial listed below will help you understand them. In addition to the mainstream search facilities, the Web contains a huge swag of sites which act like search facilities within particular topics. If you're interested in Web design, for instance, your first stop will probably be Webreference, which lists top sites in various categories of Web page construction. To Web design sites like Lighthouse, a link from Webreference is as crucial as a link from Yahoo, and a link from the Web site construction sites maintained by Netscape and Microsoft will also gain you handy exposure. ... The Cross-Border Crapshoot ...But separate from these site lists are the very different indexes - search facilities which use automated devices (often "spiders" or "bots) to try to describe every page on the Web, or at least every submitted page. The best-known of these is AltaVista. AltaVista is a must for your site promotion. It's also famous for generating pages with headings along the lines "Documents 1-10 of about 10000000 matching the query, best matches first.". Indeed, if you type "Web site design" into AltaVista, that's the message you'll get. Why one particular site appears first, I simply can't tell you. When I searched those keywords, this crowd came first and this extraordinarily bad-looking web design company came second. To fine-tune your site for search engines like AltaVista, you should search for the sort of topics that would be requested by your target user. Take a look at the sites which turn up at the top of AltaVista's list, then try and work out why AltaVista picked them first. Sometimes the difference will be as simple as whether your page title begins with Aardvark or Zygote (don't laugh, folks: the very capable Aardvark Web Designs is one of the first sites to appear when you type "Web site design" into the Excite search engine, and a prominent Web site promotion service is called AAA Internet Promotions). Sometimes the reasoning behind AltaVista's listings will remain incomprehensible (as with the sites above). But as noted in the c|net article listed below, you can manipulate the keyword facility by repeating keywords - "keyword stuffing". The c|net guide and Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines, also listed below, will help you to persuade these engines to list your sites high - but at some point you'll just have to take your site in your hands and pray. ... And No Short-CutsOne popular free service, Submit It!, listed below, lets you submit your site to sites such as Yahoo!, WebCrawler and Lycos by filling out a single form. Unfortunately, you'll get the best results by submitting directly, one by one, to all the major individual search services. And you'll probably want to make announcements to any newsgroups discussing topics related to your site. If you're running a business, you'll also want to take care to expose your site offline - on business cards, in printed ads, in press releases and the like. Did I say I'd come to the moment when I submitted my Web site? Sorry. I mean the month ...
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The Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines 
AltaVista submission