URL Search Engines

So, you finally have your website up and running eh? Great! Now all you have to do is to sit back and wait for the visitors to come right on. But wait a minute there… With over a billion websites existing at present and hundreds of thousands being added each day, how are visitors ever going to find their way to your website? Welcome to the world of URL search engines!

Simply put, a URL search engine is a simple program that trawls or crawls the web to look for keywords and classifies web pages on the basis of those keywords. This enables us to neatly categorize the worldwide web and to find relevant information when we need it. The search engine also has a front-end that we use to type in the query. When this query is run, it in effect searches through billions of URLs to identify and present those URLs which have the highest incidence of the search string.

But how do you submit your URL to search engines in the first place. With some URL search engines, it is as easy as going to the website and putting in your website URL for inclusion. For instance the URL search engine Google (www.google.com) feeds over 80 search engines, including the likes of AOL. So, visiting their website to ask for a free listing will ensue that if your URL is selected for inclusion, at least 80 search engines will reflect your URL in their search results.

Inktomi is another URL search engine that feeds over 125 search engines including Yahoo, HotBot, MSN and several others. But Inktomi has no free submissions available. It only features paid search strings and submitting your URL here may not be worth the while.

Remember that merely submitting your website is not sufficient to get your website at the top of the search listings. Your URL needs to be indexed in these search engines. And indexing in mot URL search engine may take upwards of a month (and in some cases, up to 8 weeks) for your URL to become popular enough for inclusion. But if you are in some sort of a hurry to increase the number of visitors to your website, you might choose to go for the pay per click option.

In pay per click search engines, users will type certain keywords in a URL search engine and will get a set of results. Whenever they click on these results, the owner of the URL will be charged a certain amount. This amount is determined by how common the keywords are or how high up in the search listings you want to be listed. But if volume of traffic rather than transaction is your game, then the pay per click route will prove to be very attractive indeed.

With other URL search engines, it is a little more complicated. You need to decide whether it is worth paying for the privilege of having your website listed there to substantiate the traffic that may result from your URL being present in the search results. At the end of the day, unless you can get visitors to your site, there is no point in having the site at all. And any expense you may incur as a result of trying to get your website featured on URL search engines, can very well be classified as a genuine marketing and publicity expense!