Dear Kalena…

I have recently optimized a friend’s website. The site was already listed with Google and Yahoo etc. I have noticed that since uploading the site a few weeks ago the new description and title for the home page is now listed and a few of the new page extensions.

In the SEO 201 course, you recommended submitting different listing descriptions for each search engine/directory. However, all the search engines are just using the title and description from each page they have listed.

1) Should I be listing pages not listed on the popular search engines or wait till the find them.

2) Should I only submit alternative descriptions where the site is not currently listed and do I only need to submit the home page?

With thanks

Peta

Dear Peta

You generally don’t need to submit sites to search engines as they will be discovered, provided there is at least one site pointing to them. But what you should make sure of is that each page on your site is being indexed. You can do this by creating an XML sitemap of your site and submitting it to Google via Webmaster Tools (also via Yahoo). More info is available at www.sitemaps.org.

Regarding different descriptions and titles – search engines will use whatever they think is the most relevant snippet from a page in relation to the search query. This could be taken from the title tag, the description or from the text on the page itself. You can control this to some extent by making sure each page on your site is optimized for a small range of target keywords/phrases so that each page has the opportunity to rank on it’s own merit.

When I talk about submitting different descriptions, I am generally talking about when submitting your site to niche directories and search engines that don’t automatically crawl sites to discover new pages.  If you use different descriptions for these submissions, you can easily track keyword referrals in your log files and recognize which sites are bringing you the most traffic. I hope this answers your question.

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