Which is best, manual website submission or automated website submission? Actually, doing "both" is most effective!


Manual Submission

Manual 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 Software

Automated 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 Software

The 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?


Summary

To 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:

  1. Submit-It Web Submission Service. Announce your Web site to your choice of more than 400 search engines, directories (including Yahoo!), what's new sites, and award sites in 30 categories. Comes with Free Web page analyzer and Free verification
  2. Register-It Web Submission Service. Submit your website to over 400 search engines and directories. Perform a Free Website Garage web page tune up.
  3. TrafficBoost Web Submission Services. Submit your website to over 500 search engines and directories.

Automated Versus Individual Submissions

by Brian D. Chmielewsk

Submit your web site to 500 search engines for $29.95. If you have been online for any amount of time, you've probably seen this type of email ad before. Before you reach for your credit card or complete any enrollment forms, there are a few things that you should be aware of.

Veteran WebPromote Weekly subscribers will be quick to point out that there are not actually 500 search engines, but nine. True search engines are spider-based, meaning that the host software sends out a scout to get information about your web site based on your web site's web address, or URL. These types of search tools can index your site simply by knowing your web site address, or URL, and possibly your email address. This makes them easily identifiable. The remaining 490 of these sites are comprised of directories, yellow pages, and other free link sites. Presently, Yahoo! and LookSmart are two of the larger directories.

Why should your web site be listed in sites beyond the top ten? In online marketing,
opportunities that offer exposure for your business and simplicity for the user to find you are important. By submitting your web site to every location available, you are increasing the odds of a potential client or customer reading your site description and easily clicking a link to leap to your site. You increase your chances to boost your site's traffic. Therefore, you want to make certain that your web site has a presence and that your description and link are correct at every one of these sites.

Many of the services like the one mentioned in the opening paragraph use automated software programs to submit your site. One problem with these automated submission programs is that they often make mistakes when submitting web site listing information to multiple directories and yellow pages. A common error stemming from automated software programs is a description for a website that is cut off half way through the middle of a sentence. This is because the software
cannot distinguish the rules for submission for each directory that it submits to. Look at the following example and see if you can determine what service this site offers?

OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online Support - OCLC Reference Services / OCLC 

FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online. IP-address Recognition. Internet Protocol (IP) Address

Recognition Access Method. --http://www.oclc.org/oclc/software/ecoip.htm

This is an example of how automated submissions can harm your marketing efforts. The automated software program that was used simply took the first text on this web site and plugged it incorrectly into the description text box. When you consider that more than three-fourths of the sites that all submission services use in their lists are directories and yellow pages, you realize that errors here can cause severe visibility problems for your web site.

To liberate your Web presence of these errors, employ a directory listing service that submits your website individually to each yellow page and directory. This will ensure that you are listed in the proper location and that your site's description is accurate. If OCLC's competitor employs a individualized service they will have a grammatically appealing description and would have a better chance of getting the interested user to click through to their site. Because of the cosmetic atmosphere of the Internet, this issue is very important. To users, your site appears inferior and you may get passed over for your competitor simply because of looks.

Make no mistake, every directory, search engine, and Internet yellow page is a completely independent entity that has its own rules for submissions. Rather then just prompting a program to send out a "robot" or a "spider" to go out and index the information in your site like search engines do, practically all directories have people that review each submission for categorization into their database. So, you run the risk of not being added to a directory if the information about your web site is not categorized properly or is not organized effectively for the specific search tool.

Each directory has different categories and sub-categories and they all allow varying lengths for your web site's descriptive text. This is where an automated program really starts to get confused. When the program does not find the exact category match for one that you selected it to submit your site to, it must make the choice on the closest alternative. That is one reason why it is not uncommon to a find something totally unrelated to what you are searching for when you perform a keyword search. For instance, a book keeper improperly listed in a bookmaking category simply because the software could not rationalize a better alternative.

If you have an incorrect site description, you know how difficult editing it can be. Do it right the first time and use an individual submission service.


 

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Last modified: August 05, 2007