RWAP Services review find the best systems to help drive visitors to your website.

Search Engine Submission Programs

Other RWAP Websites
RWAP Software
(supporting the Sinclair QL, Cambridge Z88 and ZX Spectrum)

Internet Business Angels
(Providing advice to small business)

Once you have created a website, you need to ensure that it reaches the largest possible audience. You can do this by asking other similar sites to include links to your website, possibly through the use of an affiliate program or by submitting your website to the various search engines which exist.

As most people surfing the internet will look for information on their desired topics, using one of the 1000s of search engines which exist, it is imperative that you take steps to ensure that your site is included in search listings and also that your site appears near the top of listings.

Free Tools Available

We have tried out various different tools for submitting websites to search engines, and have found that many of the tools, especially the free ones, tend to include out of date information on search engines, submit your website to 1000s of FFA link sites (which tend to result in you receiving a large amount of junk emails) and cannot handle the search engine submission pages which require you to enter a randomly generated verification code (the code appears as a graphic which cannot be interpreted by most software). As a result, many of the various programs and free submission pages on offer say that your site submission has failed to many of the well known search engines.

One of the options around this is to pay a web site promotion company to promote your website for you - the problem with this is that it can prove to be very expensive, incurring an annual charge and you also have to be careful to check how often your site will be re-submitted (or changes submitted to the search engines). This should be once a month ideally, although if you upload a host of changes to your website, it would be beneficial to submit the new pages as soon as possible.

Google provide a very useful tool to allow you to check your site statistics within their GoogleBot web robot (the program which indexes all websites). This tool is called Google Sitemaps and allows you to see the main keywords used to access your website and also how your website ranks compared to other similar search results. You can then use a program such as Internet Business Promoter to analyse your website against the higher ranking websites and find out useful suggestions on how to improve your page ranking. Coupled with useful utilities such as Indextools this can provide a wealth of information about visitors to your website, how long they stay there, where they are from and help you to specifically target your services to your visitors.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Another option, which we have used to some degree in order to promote our websites is to use pay per click advertising, such as under the scheme operated by Overture which provides its own search engine, but also ensures that your bids count towards listings with MSN, Yahoo!, Altavista, AlltheWeb and Lycos at the same time. Bids can take the form of either a one-off payment, or an amount paid to the search engine for each click to your website which is generated from that search engine. Following the creation of our new website (www.rwapadventures.com), we were pleased that we had found a hosting package with iPower (which we review here), who offer $50 to spend with Overture (USA account - although other users can sign up with a US account as well), if you sign up to one of their extremely good value web hosting packages. This has been used to great effect to help drive traffic to our new site.

An alternative to this pay per click scheme is to use a new scheme, such as CPASE which provides its own search engine, and allows you to bid for keywords in searches. However, instead of bidding on an amount which you pay for each time that someone using their search engine clicks the link to your website (as happens under Overture and any other Pay Per Click engine), you bid on the conversion of clicks to leads or sales. The position of your website within search results depends upon the amount which you bid for a lead or a sale and also the conversion rate from a click to a sale (or lead). This means a little more work on your part, as you need to add code to your website to notify CPASE whenever a sale or a lead is confirmed (this checks to see whether the sale or lead is as a result of the user coming from the CPASE search engine). However, it can save advertisers a fortune.

The main problem with CPASE, has to be the fact that they are not linked to any major search engines at present, and therefore you are reliant upon them promoting their new search engine, and users switching to use it.

Also, we have found that although both of these schemes can be highly beneficial to a website, it can prove expensive unless you have a high turnover in sales and leads which generate new business for your business. Having tried out many of the other free web promotion tools on the internet, we believe that the best way is to use pay per click (or pay per sale as with CPASE) for high value/volume sales and to promote your website generally using commercial software which place this entirely under your control, rather than placing it in the hands of agents or relying upon free tools.

Although this generally requires some capital investment yourself, we believe that the cost of software to submit and report on the search engine rankings of your website, should soon pay for themselves and provide you with the control you need to ensure that your website is regularly submitted to the most popular websites (and not just FFA links) and new webpages are notified to the search engines as soon as possible. Plus, if you wanted to offset the cost of purchasing the software, you could always set up your own business of promoting other people's websites on their behalf !!

Site Submission Software To Put You In Control

Having looked at a wide variety of software to help you perform this task, we believe that the most comprehensive and easiest to use packages are the Internet Business Promoter from Axandra and SubmitWolf from Trellian Software.

SubmitWolf Internet Website Submission program SubmitWolf costs from $149.95 provides an easy to use interface to allow you to set up several projects - each project can contain a list of websites to be submitted to over a 1000 search engines and directories and over 500,000 link pages. You are able to enter the details of page title, description (both brief and long), keywords for each URL by hand, or ask the program to read in the details from the pre-existing file. Contact details only have to be added once per project and you can then quickly select which search engines, directories and FFA link pages you want to submit the project to.

The program quickly submits all the information to the selected sites and search engines, saving you hours in tracking down the relevant submission pages and entering the details by hand for every search engine. The list of search engines is updated daily, ensuring that it is rare for any results to come back as "submission failed".

SubmitWolf also contains a set of rules for each search engine to prevent your site (or webpages) being submitted to each site too regularly (resulting in it being seen as spam) and also preventing you from submitting your site to search engines which would deem it to contain unsuitable content (some search engines only permit sites from within their geographical area for example).

A large database of useful information and tips on how to make your web pages search engine friendly and how to improve your ranking is also included with the package. It also includes a free program to assist you with making priority submissions to those programs which charge an extras fee for this service which can prove useful if it is important to get your website quickly included on the various search engines.

The SEO Toolkit can be purchased separately, for an additional $150.00 which provides tools to analyse the top 10 rankings and compare them to your own website. It will also keep track of what search terms people are using to reach your website, track Pay Per Bid entries (such as provided by an Overture account) and check whether reciprocal links are still in force.

Finally, you may need to purchase additional search engine packs for use with SubmitWolf, depending on the location of your internet domains - these range from $14.95pa to $49.95pa. Only the US search engine database is initially included with the program and you will need to pay yearly for your chosen search engine packs. Updates to the main program (ie. from v6 to v7) are also chargeable separately.

Axandra's Internet Business Promoter ("IBP") is a very similar product and would appear to be slightly more expensive at first glance, costing €149.95 (approx $190 for European purchasers). However, it costs $149.95 for US customers, the same as SubmitWolf and European customers do not have to purchase any extra search engine packs - the difference is that European customers have to pay VAT. It does however, only come with free search engine updates for the first 90 days and costs after that for regular updates are from €79.95 (approx $100) per annum. Updates to the main program remain free.

However, not only does IBP include a similar submission engine and tools to help you to promote your website, including an in-depth help file and links to online documentation on ways of enhancing your HTML code in order to overcome shortcomings in the way in which search engines index a site (for example, where you use flash animations, frames or pictures on your site); but it also provides an extremely useful top 10 ranking report (equivalent to some of the tools provided in the SEO Toolkit available for use with SubmitWolf).

The top 10 ranking report compares your site against the top 10 ranking sites for a given search term on a chosen search engine. This then compares the way in which various elements on the page have been used by these top 10 sites as against the way in which they are used on your webpage, highlighting where you need to consider making changes on your webpage. This provides an in-depth report which you can view as HTML, text, a Word document or a PDF file and considers things such as the title, keywords, description, start of the body text, link popularity, headline texts, link texts and URLs, image text descriptions and HTML comment tags. With this in mind, you should hopefully be able to see where your site has shortcomings vis-à-vis those sites which manage to get into the top of the web page listings.

Both pieces of software will automatically submit your site to the various search engines, with the only real interaction from you, being required should a site need a random verification code. IBP works more slowly than SubmitWolf, as the latter can open up to 50 concurrent connections to search engines to speed up the submit process.

As to which method(s) of promoting your website you use is strictly a personal matter and depends upon the funds available and how many pages you are likely to submit to websites. For us, we have chosen a mixture of Pay Per Click with Overture and the Internet Business Promoter from Axandra.

Axandra also provide a free, but extremely useful Search Engine Facts newsletter which provides useful tips on getting your website to appear towards the top of search engines. You may also want to download their free link popularity tool which allows you to check on the popularity of links to your website from other websites and how they compare to similar sites within specified search engines.

For more information on improving your website and increasing visitor traffic, have a look at our companion website: www.internetbusinessangels.com