Search Engine Submission

Having good rankings in the search engines is one of the ways for your site to get a lot of exposure and a lot of visitors - all at no charge if you can do the work yourself. One of the first steps is to get your site indexed in the search engines, which can be done through submissions. Submitting a website to a search engine, however, does not guarantee inclusion and you may have to wait months before it's properly indexed.

Should you pay to be included in the index? It depends on how quickly you want your site to rank. Some webmasters prefer to let the engine take its natural course. They do the free submit option and wait patiently for it to be indexed while working on link reciprocation to build an even larger internet presence. Link popularity also helps in building PageRank, a Google technology.

Here's a list of the search engines that you should be thinking of submitting your site to. Although there are hundreds of search engines on the net, only a few of those have the potential of delivering substantial amounts of traffic, and thus, those are the only ones that you should concern yourself with.

Google: Shows searches at any Google-owned web site such as Google.com or Google Image Search. May show searches at some Google partners that show Google's domain in the URLs of their search results, as happens with Go.com. I'm checking on this and will update in the future.

Yahoo: Shows searches at any Yahoo-owned web site, including perhaps those of Overture, AltaVista and AllTheWeb. "Domain AutoSearch" searches, where someone did an address bar search or navigational request and got information back from Yahoo, have been excluded from figures.

MSN: Shows searches at any MSN-owned web site such as MSN Search. "Domain AutoSearch" searches, where someone did an address bar search or navigational request and got information back from Yahoo, have been excluded from figures.

AOL: Shows searches at AOL Search and perhaps Netscape Search.

Ask: Shows searches at Ask Jeeves and perhaps Ask Jeeves-owned Teoma.