Many people treat the submission of their pages to the search engines as a trivial step. Create cool pages, give the domain to the search engines, then sit back and wait for your site to show up. Don't get too upset if it doesn't, but submission is more than such a simple step.
If you study a map of the search engines and how they share data between themselves you will find that The Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) feeds data into Google and several other major search engines. The ODP is a directory, not a search engine. It's a free directory. It's pretty important, then, for you to be listed in this ODP in order to get listed in Google and other search engines. Since this directory is updated by humans, and volunteers at that, it can take awhile for your submission to show up in the ODP, and then even longer for it to ripple through to other engines even after you have submitted your site. We suggest you submitting to ODP as soon as your site is ready - but not before. Since humans will be looking at your site to list it in ODP, you don't want them to reject you because you have a dinky site. Also, be sure none of your pages are "under construction."
Second, before you submit to the directory or search engines, you should have at least one high-quality link into your site. For sites we design, we always put a quality link to their site from our site to insure a good link is there. We often submit the page that links to my site, even though it belongs to someone else. This forces Google to find the link.
There are many search engines to which you can submit your site. This list is changing constantly, and they share data between them. Most people only use one or two of the major engines for their searching. When you submit to any engine, you will be asked give them your email address. If you submit to these minor search engines, you are giving these engines an address they can sell for spamming. You will see your spam load go up dramatically.
Also, there are a large number of sites that do nothing but list web site addresses by category. You submit, they give you a free link - but do nothing. These are often called link farms. When you submit to them they, too, then have your address they can sell it for spamming. The better search engines check the links from your site for their quality, and a poor quality link from your site to a link farm page can drop you in the search engine listings. Avoid these link farms.
Finally, in most cases it is not necessary to submit you site to a search engine at all. If there are trusted sites in the engine that already link to you, the engines will find you without any additionial work on your part.
Find out more about submitting your site - get our eBook.
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