Next - Increasing Your Publicity in Directories & Search Engines
After you have made up your mind in choosing different keywords for your site, the next step you are going to do is increase the publicity of your sites, that is being listed or indexed by some major search engines and directories.
Basically, there are a few way to do so. An easy going way is to submit your site to some well known directory, like Yahoo!. What is a driectory? Yahoo! is a searchable directory of web pages that are reviewed, selected and categorized by humans, obviously, Yahoo! is moving from directory to a real search engine. Then What is a search engine? A search engine is just a robot of crawlling web page, rather than reviewed, selected and categorized by humans only, surely i am sure that Google has some human efforts behind it.
No matter what they are, being listed is what you need for the first spot of light!
If you choose some big directory web sites, like Yahoo!, you can pay them to get a "yes/no" answer whether your site is indexed or not. Another good source for being indexed is the Open Directory Project (ODP). Getting in ODP, i would like to say it is a great success of your beginning of your web site.
Or you can try to use Google Sitemap, it is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. Click here for more information about Google Sitemap.
Also here are some other well known directories and search engine, that you may be interested in
Altavista
A9
AOL
Clusty
Gigablast
Google
Lycos
MSN
Teoma
Wisenut
Yahoo!
What is Google Sitemaps?
Tell you information of what I digested, it is much better quoting from the source.
"Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps you can automatically keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl."
With Google Sitemaps you get:
1. Better crawl coverage and fresher search results to help people find more of your web pages.
2. A smarter crawl because you can tell us when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes.
3. New! Detailed reports to learn more about how Google directs traffic to your site and how the Googlebot sees your pages.
And the most important is, it is free of charge!
What is Open Directory Project?
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
Here are some quote from their web
The Republic of the Web
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The web continues to grow at staggering rates. Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can't keep pace with the growth of the Internet.
Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself. As the Internet grows, so do the number of net-citizens. These citizens can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.
The Definitive Catalog of the Web
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The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on words through the efforts of a volunteers, the Open Directory follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the Web.
The Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free. There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to the directory, and/or to use the directory's data. The Open Directory data is made available for free to anyone who agrees to comply with our free use license.
The Internet Brain
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The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.