When submitting a URL to a search engine what should appear in the
"site description" input window?

Hi littlejew-ga,

When submitting a URL to a search engine, the most important thing is
to ensure that the URL is correct! Once you've tackled that enormous
task, depending on the engine you are submitting to, you may have
other questions that need to be answered.

In Google's case ( ://www.google.com/addurl.html ), it only asks
for the site's URL and "Comments". Comments are generally ignored by
google: in all the sites I've submitted, I've never noticed the
comments making any difference to the indexing.

A "Site Description" should be a short 100-200 character description
of the site. For example, if you were submitting for
http://www.travelocity.ca (just to use an example), you might want to
use:

"Search for the lowest air fares, hotels and rental cars in one
convenient site. We guarantee to find the lowest fares available!"

Short, sweet, to the point, and above all--RELEVANT to the site! Avoid
using the site domain name in the description (eg. using the word
"Travelocity" in the description), and also avoid repeating yourself.
Use words that someone would use to find you. "Travel", "Air Fares",
"Hotels", etc..

Quite frankly, most modern search engines ignore much of what you
enter into a site description anyways: so, don't worry about it too
much--unless you're submitting to a Directory (like
http://www.dmoz.com or http://directory.google.com ), the site
description will typically be ignored for the information located on
the site directly.

Hope this helps you. If anything I've said is unclear, please ask for
clarification prior to rating and closing this question.

Thanks,

Legolas-ga

---

Request for Answer Clarification by littlejew-ga on 27 May 2003 19:13 PDT

Is the description a description of the site or a description of the
business that the site describes

---

Clarification of Answer by legolas-ga on 27 May 2003 22:02 PDT

The description is, in the simplest terms possible, whatever you want
a prospective vistor to know about the site. You can describe the site
(i.e. "Low rates, fares and quick booking of all airline tickets") or
you can describe the business that the site describes (i.e. "Company
ABC is a fortune 500 company that specializes in airline bookings, and
tickets"). More often than not, it should be written as a "sales
pitch" that describes the SITE itself.

Hope that clarifies it for you,

Legolas-ga