We have found that submitting to HotBot does not get a site posted, however, we have discovered that by submitting your Site to Canada.com your site will be indexed in about 2-3 weeks, sometime sooner. Canada.com has the same site requirements for accepting sites as the guidelines below.
 
HotBot does a full page indexing. What this means is that it will look at all of the text on your page and rank it accordingly by content. Their spider will first look at your title tag and try to figure out what your site is about (so put key words in the title). They will next look at your meta description tag and try to pick out key words from that. Then the spider will look at your Meta keyword tag and take these keywords and look for them in the body of your text on the page. HotBot does give weight to the words in this tag. If you have one hundred keywords in this tag then any given one has very little weight. We recommend no more that six key words or phrases.
 
Next, they will send their spider to look at the text in the main body of the page. Repeat your key words or phases often but do not go overboard. HotBot's algorithms where designed by some of the best engineers in the business and are extremely difficult to get a grasp of. What seems to work in one instance does not work in the next and this can get very frustrating. The only real hint we can give here is to try and balance your key elements and do not over do it. The key elements are: Title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta keyword tag and body text, in that order.
 
HotBot does not index Alt image tags, however, does look at text between comment tags so you can use these to get in more keywords and text. Do not use hidden or tiny text because their spider will consider this a spam technique and will penalize your page heavily or reject it completely. If you have a frames site make sure you use the "NOFRAMES" tag and put text in those tags letting the spider know what your site is about. HotBot does not spider frames and the only way for the spider to know what is in your site is the "NOFRAMES" tag.
 
To go directly to HotBot's Submit Page Click Here!