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How often should I submit my site to the search engines? Every 3 months? Monthly? Annually?

Site submission is a neverending, ongoing process because search engines constantly change their relevancy algorithms. We recommend that you resubmit a web page to a search engine only when there is a significant change to web page or if a page has dropped from the index. (Changing a meta-tag description does not constitute a significant change.) For directories - if your site is already there - you don't have to resubmit your site at all.

What is the difference between spider-based search engine and human-based search engine?

Most people incorrectly believe that crawler-based search engines and human-based search engines are the same. A crawler-based search engine uses a program that searches documents (i.e. web pages, which are mostly HTML documents) for specified keywords and returns the list of documents. You do not have to submit your site to the spider-based search engines. They will generally find your site on their own.

A human-based search engine (such as Yahoo, commonly mistaken for a crawler-based search engine) depends on people for listings. A directory will not list your web page if you do not register it with them. Directories are usually divided into categories and you must submit your URL under the most appropriate categories.

Directories often have partnerships with spider-based search engines for supplemental or fall-through results.

How should I select my keywords - by page or by entire site?

Every page of your site has its own unique keyword phrases based upon the information it provides. This means that when a search engine is determining which page in its database is relevant to the search query at hand, it's looking for the best, most relevant page - not site. That is why you should select individual sets of keywords for every page and make sure these keywords appear in the texts of the pages.

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