[HELP INDEX]

Submitting your website URL to be crawled and indexed by search engines is a good way to kickstart your traffic. At Walnet though, search engine referral only accounts for about 13 per cent of our traffic. Most traffic comes from link referrals on other sites and people's personal bookmark lists.

The document title is the single most important part of a webpage to search engines. Most search engine bots ignore metatags for keywords and content descriptions. Keyword metatags can be useful, but only if they are specific to the content of the page, not one huge list of keywords put on every page of your site.

Search engine crawlers also ignore comment tags, but they DO read and index the content of "ALT" in image tags. This is especially useful for photo-based sites because you can put keywords in your image tags so that your photos are indexed on search engines.

If you would like to look up a domain name, either to see if it is taken or to see who has registered it, you can use one of these handy Whois links:
www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois.

For more information about search engines, check out:
www.searchenginewatch.com

• Google:
  www.google.com/addurl.html
• Excite:
  www.excite.com/Info/add_url.html
• Infoseek:
  infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html
• AltaVista:
  www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=addurl
• Lycos:
  www.lycos.com/addasite.html
• HotBot:
  www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp
• Webcrawler:
  webcrawler.com/Help/GetListed/AddURLS.html
• Northernlight:
  www.northernlight.com/docs/register.htm
• Netfind AOL:
  search.aol.com/add.adp
• Canada.com
  www.canada.com/search/web/addurl.asp
• NBCi:
  www.nbci.com/LMOID/resource/0,566,-1077,00.html?st.sn.ld.0.1077
• LookSmart:
  submit.looksmart.com/info.jhtml?synd=US&chan=lshomeft

Some search engines require that you submit your site to the appropriate categories or areas of there indices. www.yahoo.com set this trend. Yahoo also has search engines for many different countries.