Native Spanish speakers rank second in the world after native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Spanish speakers live mostly in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. In fact, here is a huge population of Spanish speakers in the U.S. However, many internet marketers have yet to realize full effectiveness in reaching Spanish speakers. Also, Spanish in one country like Mexico is slightly different from another country such as Spain. For example, Spanish speakers in the United States are influenced by American culture so targeting them will be different than the methods used to target those in Argentina. There are numerous Spanish websites and here are some of the more popular ones.
Google Spain and Mexico (http://www.google.es, http://www.google.com.mx). Just like most of the world, Google remains the most popular search engine among those in the Spanish Internet market. You can add your web pages to Google through the link: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. With Google, you do not need to submit each page of your site—only the top-level home page. Google’s crawling algorithm will read the rest of it. While the pages do not have to be in Spanish, consider that Spanish search engine users will more than likely use Spanish keywords. Keeping this in mind, it is a good idea to have some Spanish language content on your website that targets Spanish keywords.
Abacho Spain (http://Abacho.es). This search engine is actually owned by a German company which runs Abacho regional sites for several countries in Europe. How to add your pages to Abacho is not very intuitive so a good place to start is to write them through their contact page.
Mexico Web (http://www.mexicoweb.com.mx/). Mexico Web is a directory and only caters to domains located in Mexico. The pages you submit are reviewed by a person but the turnaround time to inclusion is short. To add your site to Mexico Web go to the link: http://www.mexicoweb.com.mx/agregar.html.
Ozu (http://ozu.es). Ozu is a portal offering other services in addition to searching. It has news, chat, humor feeds, email, horoscopes, and other services typically found on this type of site. One interesting feature of Ozu is that you can get the news of day as a downloadable PDF (portable document format) file.
Terra (http://www.terra.es). Terra is a web portal and internet service provider with its search engine powered by Google. So, if your home page is in Google’s index then it obviously can be accessed from Terra. Submission of pages to Terra requires a fee. Information about fees and submission can be found at http://www.terra.com/insite/.
TypicallySpanish.com. (http://typicallyspanish.com). This search engine promotes itself as an English language website in Spain. However, you can also switch to Spanish. The site is a directory and news portal as well as a search engine. You can add the URL to your website for free and the instructions on their submission page are very clear and informative. Their rules are clear as well. Your pages must be only Spain-related but you can submit one main page in Spanish and one in English. They have a spider system that will read the remainder of your website from the top-level main page. It is also relatively easy to submit your page by selecting the directory category (i.e., Real Estate, Business, Internet, etc.) and then clicking on the link labeled “Add Free URL.” Turnaround time for approval of free links takes about six months. There is also a premium option where you can get inclusion quickly.
Ask.com Spain (http://www.es.ask.com). Ask.com is popular for its ability to accept question-like search commands from users. The same ability exists for the Spanish language. Information on how to get your pages added can be found on the help page at http://sp.es.ask.com/es/docs/about/asksearch.shtml#10. Information on this help page indicates that someone will contact you about URL submission.
Yahoo! Spain (http://es.search.yahoo.com/). The world famous Yahoo! has its Spanish version too. It also has a system of reading web pages across the internet and when it finds your pages it will evaluate it for addition to its database. You will want to have a Spanish language page so that it can get evaluated for Spanish search keywords.
