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Your Organizations Web Site - Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come

Many website owners are under the mistaken assumption that if they build a web site and launch it on the Internet  it will naturally start to show up in the search engines and that without much work the site will start to get visitors, forget it. This is not “The Field of Dreams” and getting your web site to show up and then getting visitors to that web site requires work. The good news for anyone reading this is that there are some straightforward legitimate techniques for getting your web site to show up better in the search engines.

Two types of visitors

Most likely when you think about the visitors that you want to reach your website you’re thinking about human visitors, but what you may not realize is that you also want automated software that is variously referred to as spiders, crawlers, robots and search bots. These bots are workhorses always moving across the Internet where they collect information about web pages, depositing the information in databases for search engines to use when serving results to human searchers.

This means that if you want new human visitors to find your web pages via Google, Yahoo, MSN and others you have to feed specific information, in a specific way to their bots. For starters you will need to signal these bots to come and take a look at your web site in the first place. Generally, if your web site is older and has been linked to by another web site that the specific search bot is already familiar with it will have found your web site and will revisit it occasionally or even regularly to gather information about changes. But what if your site is new or you add a second site like a blog? Each of three major search engines offers a way to notify their bots that you have put up a new web site. You’ll want to go to each of the following three links and register your site.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl
MSN: http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
Yahoo:https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

For each of these you only need to submit the home page of your site, (including the http://www. portion) so the entire process takes under five minutes. Each of the bots will then follow the links from your home page to your other pages so that all pages are indexed.