MendoClick™
Search Engine Submission

If you found this website through an Internet search, SubmitWolf Pro probably deserves some of the credit. Automated search engine submission software like this enables you to register your own site effectively, saving you the cost of a submission service or the time of manually going to each search engine site and filling in their forms one by one.

SubmitWolf Pro also enables you to check your ranking by keyword, giving valuable feedback to help you improve the odds that people will find you. To rank in the top ten, you will still need to study, get help, use trial and error, and/or get lucky, but SubmitWolf Pro will save you time so you can work on it.

This shareware allows you to choose from over 1000 search engines and directories. It includes a wizard to help you automate submission to sites not already in the software's directory. It also permits automated 48-hour, paid priority submission to sites including MSN, AOL, HotBot, Overture (formerly GoTo), iWon, AltaVista, Slider.com and Inktomi. The shareware keeps track of which submissions were successful and the last date submitted. Before you actually submit, it estimates the number of emails that the sites you have selected will send to you. If the submission to a particular site fails, that site remains selected for the next time unless you choose otherwise.

SubmitWolf Pro will not pick your keywords for you, but it will generate metatags from your input or import them from your web page's HTML code. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it handles not only those which most affect search engine ranking - keywords, description, and title - but also copyright, author, publisher, email, language, character set, distribution, rating (general, mature, or restricted), expiration, robots, and revisit time. When presented with such a simple fill-in-the-box form for generating them, I quickly went ahead and added them all. Metatags are helpful documentation.

One word of advice: The program has both a "Keyword Manager" and a "Metatags Editor." Although it is possible to edit keywords in both places, changes in one place are not reflected in the other. The exception came when I tried "clear" in the Keyword Manager and found all the words had also been cleared from the Metatags Editor. You can only update the metatags in your HTML file from the Metatags Editor, so I recommend that you change your keywords there. Otherwise, you have to remember to do a copy-and-paste operation from the Keyword Manager to the Metatags Editor. To make matters worse, the main project page only reflects changes made in the Keyword Manager, so once you update your HTML file, you should use the "Import" function to make sure the project page reflects the latest HTML file.

I suspect the Metatags Editor function is new. If it were my program, I would get rid of the Keyword Manager and make the main project page reflect the Metatags Editor. I suspect it will not be long before Trellian fixes this problem one way or another; the rest of the software is too well done to allow this sort of inconsistency to continue.

The free trial version of SubmitWolf Pro allows you to submit to four search engines - Lycos, Direct Hit, Slider, and What-U-Seek. This is enough to learn if the product will meet your needs. You can see the list of the other search engines and link sites that will be available, but you cannot use them until you pay the $95 purchase price. Buying the product also allows you to access "Ranking Tips," which I must admit were disappointingly basic.

Other submission software I tested had fewer features and/or was more poorly organized. A few had features not found in SubmitWolf Pro, such as the ftp client in Dynamic Submission 2000 for uploading your web pages. (Otherwise you have to buy it separately. I use SSH instead, so I had no use for it.) Another reason to consider other software would be the difference in which sites were programmed for submission.

Factors in my choice of SubmitWolf Pro were its simplicity and logic from the user's perspective (in spite of the keyword problem) and the professional appearance of the product and website. Furthermore, according to the manufacturer's website, "Trellian employs a team of eighteen full time programmers to maintain our engine database." Adequate updates of search engine information means more successful submissions. Trellian appears to have the company to support its program for years to come.

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