Cuarta sesión: Mettasession de música Celta

Like any service-oriented business, registration services are for-profit enterprises. You can’t blame these services for trying to make a buck off their hard work. The cost of registering your site can jump to hundreds of dollars, however, and most registration services base their charges on the number of URLs that you want to register and the number of places

to which you submit your URLs. For example, a registration service might charge $30 to submit a single URL to 50 search engines, $60 to submit two URLs to 50 search engines, or $100 to submit one URL to 150 search engines.

But before you shell out your hard-earned cash or corporate money, you should know what you are buying. The first thing you might notice when you examine the resources provided by a registration service is that you’ve probably never heard of most of these sites. Some of the sites are small and receive very little Web traffic at all. Worse, you might find that some of the sites don’t even function.

Additionally, you should note that resource sites are frequently for restricted types of search engines and directories. You will find Yellow Pages directories that take only business listings. You will find directories for Web sites covering specific geographic areas, such as Canada, Europe, or Asia. You will also find specialty directories, such as What’s New? directories, award sites, and guides to the best of the Web.

In the end, whether you can register with 50 or 500 search engines doesn’t really matter. What matters is the number of search engines that you can use out of those available. Fortunately, the best sites are usually those included in the first 50. Because of this, you get more bang for your buck if you stick to the basics—and the free services covered in this chapter are the ultimate in getting your money’s worth.

The most important thing to consider when you use registration services is the type of site with which you are registering. As you learned in pre- vious chapters, there is a huge difference between a search engine and a Web directory.

Search engines use the URL that you specify to crawl through your entire site and will usually schedule your site for periodic reindexing. Because search engines reindex your site, you only need to register with a search engine once. And because search engines crawl through your entire site, you only need to register the URL to your top-level home page. That

said, it is still a good idea to register your Web site with search engines once every six months. This protects your site from being dropped or not being reindexed automatically.

On the other hand, Web directories create a listing only for the page you specify, and they rarely update the listing. Because Web directories focus on pages rather than entire sites, you can register multiple URLs for the same site. The URLs that you submit should be for separate areas that cover different topics.

Because Web directories rarely update listings, you are responsible for updating your listing in the directory if you move the furniture around at your Web site, which doesn’t necessarily mean that you should reregister with the directory. Instead, you should check the directory to see whether it has an update or change process. To make life easier on yourself and to avoid having to submit changes for your listings, you can use the redirection techniques discussed in the Sunday Afternoon session under “Gaining Lost Readers from Error Analysis.”

While this chapter focuses on providing you with a list of online registration services, there are also a number of software products that you can purchase and install on your computer in order to set up your own registration process. However, unlike the free services listed in this chapter, these software products will cost you a few dollars. If you are interested in learning more about these software products, check out Appendix A, “Additional Resources on the Web.”

In the end, if you use a registration service, don’t waste your time rereg- istering with search engines and directories you’ve already signed up with. Concentrate on the search engines and directories with which you haven’t registered.

AddMe.com

Main Page: http://www.addme.com

Sites: Submits to 20 search engines and directories for free. The submis- sion process takes 5 to 10 minutes. Your information is saved for resub- mission.

Details:Before you can submit your site using AddMe, you need to fill out the listing information shown in Figure 4.1. In exchange for using its submission services, AddMe requests that you add a link to it on your Web site by cutting and pasting a supplied piece of HTML code.

Figure 4.1

AddMe.com is a comprehensive registration service.