Many people believe that submitting a Web site is as simple as typing the URL into a search engine's submission form and pressing the "submit" button. However, the way you perform the actual search engine submission will help determine whether your Web site achieves top 10 rankings for keyword searches or if your site joins the land of the lost.

Technique #1: The first technique attempts to capitalize on a growing search engine preference. Some major search engines are scoring pages higher that were found by a search engine spider instead of having been individually submitted by someone. Therefore, you may be able to boost your site's rankings by creating what we call a "hallway" page.

A "hallway" page is a page that has links to all your different "optimized" pages you've optimized for each search engine. When this hallway page is submitted to a search engine, the search engine's spider travels down the page and branches off to these links indexing those pages you really want indexed. In theory, the pages it spidered will rank higher than the hallway page and higher than they would if they were submitted individually.

Therefore, be wary of submission programs that employ "deep promotion" or a similar term whereby all pages on the site are submitted at once. This can potentially cause a lower ranking by submitting the URL directly, and on some engines will definitely cause you to exceed their daily limits of how many URLs they will accept per day from a single domain. (Luckily, WebPosition Gold's Submitter will track your submissions per day, and warn you before you exceed known submission limits.)

(New readers: Optimized pages are simply pages that you've optimized to rank well on one or more search terms for each search engine. Optimized pages act as alternate entrances, or "optimizeds" to your Web site. Because search engines index many pages of a Web site, not everyone will find your Web site through your home page.)

We know that many major engines now rank home pages higher than other pages, all other things being equal. Therefore, my feeling is that you'll do better if you add these hallway page links to your home page versus a sub-page. This effectively makes your home page the hallway page to the rest of your site and to your optimized pages.

For even more leverage, place your hallway page on a separate domain that you own and submit it. This way you'll realize two benefits:

1) You raise the link popularity rating of the site you link to since to most search engines it will look like a third party is linking to your domain.

2) It appears to the search engine that it found your site on its own accord by following the links from another site.

The only drawback to not submitting your URLs directly is that you're dependent on the spider to traverse the links and find your other pages. They often put a lower priority on this; therefore it could take longer for you to get indexed than if you'd submitted the URLs directly. However, the wait can be worth it, particularly if you're in a competitive industry and need any extra boost you can get.

Tip: Make use of the URL Verification feature in WebPosition Gold's Reporter to make sure your optimized pages get indexed in a reasonable amount of time. If they don't, either re-submit the hallway page, or submit the individual pages separately as a last resort.

Technique #2: If you plan on using hallway pages to point to your different site pages and optimized pages, make the hyperlink (the underlined text you click on) a keyword. This can sometimes increase your rankings even more. For example, if you sell "blue widgets" and own two domains, one called www.DomainA.com and another called www.DomainB.com, place a link to DomainB from a hallway page on DomainA like this:

<a href="http://www.DomainB.com/webpage.htm">blue widgets</a>

Some search engines will recognize that another site is linking to www.DomainB.com using the targeted keyword phrase "blue widgets" as the hyperlink. The search engine logically concludes that www.DomainB.com has something to do with blue widgets, and therefore will rank the page higher for that term.

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.

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How To Do It.

1. building link popularity
2. building good traffic keywords
3. build robots txt page
4. creating rich keyword pages
5. cross linking
6. domain name dashes
7. doorway pages
8. frames and search engines
9. glossary of search engine terms
10. guilty by association
11. hallway pages
12. higher rankings
13. improve rankings through ssi
14. improve web site link-popularity
15. keyword selections
16. keyword selection wordtracker
17. keywords to optimize for
18. link building
19. link checking
20. local search optimization
21. misspelled words
22. multiple domains site
23. online marketing
24. optimized pages
25. optimizing generic pages
26. organic search
27. search engine friendly
28. search engine optimization marketing
29. search engine prominence
30. search engine spider
31. search engine submission-program
32. sem mistakes
33. sem strategies
34. seven seo steps
35. spam seo
36. submitting web site to open directory
37. target audience
38. title tags
39. track sales
40. validate code
41. web pages
42. webposition myth
43. webposition page critic
44. webposition page generator
45. website indexing
46. web site traffic
47. your own domain name