Search Engines
Introduction
Submitting to search engines is usually the first step for promoting any kind of website online. I'm not sure that many people actually find comics using search engines, but it's still not a bad idea.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to setting up your webpage so that search engines can more easily index it, assign it appropriate keywords, and possibly give it a higher ranking. There are a lot of other places to find information about search engine optimization, and even several companies you can pay to do it for you. If you really want to get into optimizing your website for search engines, the SEOmoz Search Engine Rank Factors page is a good place to start. Here are a few of the more important tips:
META Tags: Meta tags appear between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in an HTML document and provide information about the document, such as the author, a description, or keywords. Because they were so flagrantly abused, meta tags are generally ignored by search engines nowadays. However, it's still a good idea to use the description meta tag. While it won't affect your page rank or keywords, Google uses the description tag as the site description on the search results page.
Keep your description short - less than 25 words. Add a description meta tag like so:
<META name="description" content="A comic about geeks, gaming, ninjas, and breaking the fourth wall.">
The <TITLE> Tag: When a search engine is trying to decide what keywords best represent your website, it places a lot of importance on the contents in the <TITLE> tag. Therefore, you should include important keywords in your website title. For example, instead of this:
<TITLE>Bending the Spoon</TITLE>
Try this:
<TITLE>Bending the Spoon - A web comic about the shifting perceptions of reality</TITLE>
Banners: Many websites, especially webcomic sites, tend to have the title and subtitle of their page in an image banner. Unfortunately, search engine indexers cannot parse this image-text. Well-Styled has a good tutorial for a workaround which puts the text in the HTML code so it can be read by search engines, but uses CSS to display only the image to the human viewer.
DMOZ
Perhaps the most important search engine to submit your web site to is the Open Directory Project, also called DMOZ. It is a human-edited directory of websites on the internet. Not many people use the directory itself to search the Web, but Google and other search engines pull information from it. Being listed on DMOZ can also improve your Google rank. Their rules are strict, so make sure you read them carefully before submitting.
Other Search Engines
Most search engines use crawlers to find websites. If there is a link to your site somewhere on the Web, chances are they already know it's there. But you can still submit your URL to Google or Yahoo! manually, or use a free site submission tool to submit it to a bunch of search engines at once.
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