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Which is best, manual website submission or automated website submission? Actually, doing "both" is most effective!Manual SubmissionManual Submission involves us manually posting your website information to each search engine, directory or link site. Manual Submission allows for the absolute maximum amount of information to be posted regarding your site. Most search engines, directories, or link site ask for basic website information, things like page URL, short description, name of company, geographic location, keywords and a broad category such as Business or Personal. That is where the similarity ends. Each of the hundreds of search engines, directories or link sites has a different list of categories, some may have hundreds of sub categories on how a website is posted. Because SOHOSite PromoCare is a customized website promotion program, when we manually submit your website, we take into consideration every aspect of your website. We take into consideration what you do, and what market you are targeting, among other factors. We post the maximum amount of this information that any given search engine, directory or link site will allow, including things like phone and fax numbers that would not be in a automated submission. Most automated submission services and software posts to the basics only as mentioned above. Another important difference would be that we manually post the key information that each search engine, directory, or link site considers to be appropriate for their site. For example, not every search engine indexes your entire site, only certain sections. Others don't recognize certain keywords or meta tags used to boost your website in the rankings. Some even penalize or won't accept your submission if you don't meet their specific criteria. You can be assured that we are aware of each services guidelines, and will manually post correctly to them. One last and important difference, if a key search engine, directory or link site is down when the posting takes place (i.e. Yahoo), we will return back to the service and try it again. With an automated submission, you will not know you are not on Yahoo for approximately 6 weeks, then it will be six weeks more after you post when your information is finally available! We do not guarantee that your site will be accepted to all the services we manually post to. We only guarantee that each site will receive a manual submission of your data in the format they have designated as acceptable. Each site does and always has had the final say on what is accepted. Why should you pay more money for fewer manual submissions vs using automated submissions to do more services for less investment? Because it is an investment in your website or business. Automated Submission & Automated Submission SoftwareAutomated Submissions are generally done by submitting the same limited information in to each site by a cgi script. Because automated submission services are geared to the maximum number of submissions and a low price, most allow no customization and generally use the same template for every service they submit to. We consider automated submission services to be an excellent phase two option to extend your web presence after you have had the key search engines, directories and link sites posted using manual submission. We recommend posting to a list of 25 or 50 at a minimum. Because the more links you have on the web, the better, we consider automated submissions a good "shot gun" method of extending the postings. The inevitable re-posting of data to some services will not remove a manual submission. In fact, most key services protect you from changes with passwords, or separate pages and methods for making any changes. If you post only using automated submission, these passwords are never set at the services that use them and changes are very difficult. Using manual submissions, you will get a list of sites that we successfully posted to. If you use automated submission, you will generally get the list of sites that the program sent data to. At any given time 15% of the sites will be down or will have a recent address change. Using automated submissions, you may not know which actually were accepted. This is why we recommend manual submissions to a base list. In both cases some of the sites do send e-mail verification, but this is only a small percentage of 5 -10%. Automated Submission SoftwareThe are many types of automated submission software which is available for download or purchase. Generally for the same reasons as automated submission services, we consider this also to be a good phase two tactic. Another factor here you should consider is your time. Do you have time to learn new software? Do have the time to actually fill in the information that the software requires? Do you have the time for future follow up? SummaryTo summarize, we feel that both methods are an effective tool for you to use to promote your website, each has it's advantages. In order to serve our customers better, we make available a broad selection of products or services to meet your needs. If you do decide to use automated submission services or automated submission software, we recommend the following companies:
Automated Versus Individual Submissions FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online. IP-address Recognition. Internet Protocol (IP) Address
Recognition Access Method. --http://www.oclc.org/oclc/software/ecoip.htm |