Building your own Web pages to help you sell at auctions

Part 3: Letting people find you through search engines and directories

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Our online store at Yahoo
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The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.


As we discussed last week, you can use personal Web pages to help promote your auction-selling activities. But for that to be effective, you not only need to write and post informative pages, you also have to let people know that they are available. Your first step should be to make sure your pages are included in search engines and directories.

Search engines such as AltaVista (www.altavista.com), InfoSeek (www.infoseek.go.com), Excite (www.excite.com), and Hotbot (www.hotbot.com) index the contents of Web pages for free for the benefit of people who want to find information on the Internet. They send out webcrawlers -- robot programs that automatically find and retrieve Web pages and add the information to their indexes. They find Web pages from links to them on other pages. If your Web site is new, there are probably very few links to it; and, unless you intervene, it could take many months for the webcrawlers to stumble upon your pages, if they were ever to get there at all.

You need to get your pages into the search engine indexes as soon as possible, so people looking for the kinds of things that you have for sale will be able to find you. Go to each of the search engines and near the bottom of the home page, you'll see "Add URL". Click on that, and then enter the URLs of each of your pages. Then your information will be indexed within a day a day or two (AltaVista), about a week (InfoSeek) or within two to six weeks (the others).

Keep in mind that when you add your URL at a search engine like AltaVista, you are simply asking the crawler to fetch a particular page. The crawler brings back whatever text it finds at that address. All it knows is what it found on that page, not what anyone told it. Anyone -- not just a site owner -- can submit a URL.

While AltaVista indexes every word on every page, directories, like Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), the Open Directory (dmoz.org), and LookSmart (www.looksmart.com) provide categorized lists of Web sites with a brief description of each site to help take you to the home page of sites that might be of interest to you. Directories are, by definition, selective rather than all-inclusive. They typically aim for quality, rather than quantity. To be included in a directory, you fill out a form at the directory site, and eventually an editor will take a look at your submission and your actual pages and decide whether, in their judgement, the content merits inclusion. If your site is very small and contains very little useful information, they may reject your submission. Best case, expect a delay of anywhere from a month to four months from when you submit your information to when people can find you through one of these directories.

While a directory categorizes Web sites and contains very little information about them (just the description), a search engine indexes all the information on all the Web pages it finds. Directories are crafted by human beings, based on their judgement, like files in a file cabinet. Search engine indexes are generated automatically, based on the words and phrases that are found on Web pages.

Because directories and search engines are different from one another and complement one another's capabilities, most major search sites have partnered with one or another of the major directories. When you click on the name of a category, rather than entering words in a query box, you are using their directory capability.

A directory takes you to the home page of a Web site, from which point you can explore to eventually get to what you want.

A search engine takes you to the very page on which the words and phrases you are looking for appear.

Your listing in a directory will probably be the same whether you have one page or a thousand pages. What you submit is what you get (presuming the editors find your description to be clear and accurate and your content useful).

With search engines like AltaVista, presuming that you submit all your pages, the more content you have the more ways people will be able to find you. If your auction selling is related to a hobby of yours or to your full-time job, you should have a lot to say that others with similar interests might want to read. And your customers, too, might have content that they would be willing to submit to you for inclusion on your Web pages. Be creative. Keep adding to and improving your Web pages in response to the reactions you get. And whenever you make changes, go back to the search engines and Add URL.

This article and hundreds of related items by Richard is available, in plain text, on CD ROM My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002) for $29. That same CD also includes the full text of his books The Social Web, Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, and The Way of the Web. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat, where you can buy an entire library for the price of a book.

Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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