Search Engine Submission

Once you publish your website, the next step is to perform a manual search engine submission. A search engine submission is important for new websites because there's no way for a web-crawler to know that your pages exist unless you tell it of your website's where-about. However, it's important to know that a search engine submission does not guarantee a listing, or ranking on search engine results. Here are some popular places to manually submit your website:

1. Search Engine Submission to Human Edited Directories

The first place to submit your website is to human edited directories, and to the sites of major search engines that contain their own directories. One of the most important human edited directories that you should submit your site to is DMOZ Directories. With human edited directories, you will need to click through the different sub directories until you reach the relevant sub category for your site to be listed under. Human edited directories employ editors to review your submission, visit, read and decide on either to accept or reject your site. The DMOZ Directory is compiled by volunteer editors, this may help to explain why it's difficult to get your site listed. It is therefore important to take your submission seriously, and to be as precise as possible with your site's description. If you have already submitted your site to the relevant category, wait for at least a month to see if your site gets listed. If it doesn't get listed by that time, follow up with you listing by posting a question at http://www.resource-zone.com/ in the Site Submission Status Forum. Another major directory that you should submit your website to is the Yahoo Directories http://dir.yahoo.com/. Yahoo Directory charges a fee if you want your site listed within a few days. If you opt for the non-commercial option, it may take months for your site to be listed - often you won't get listed at all. In addition to DMOZ and Yahoo Directories, many specialized directories exist on the internet - the next time you do a keyword search on a subject related to your website, keep an eye open for these directories.

2. Search Engine Submission to Crawler-Based Sites

When you manually do a search engine submission to a crawler-based site (also known as "spiders" or "web crawlers"), these crawlers will usually visit, scan and index your site and store them in giant repositories of Web pages. When a visitor performs a search, your pages are retrieved from this repository and displayed according to their keyword relevance. The most important Search Engines to submit your website to are:

Google
Submit your URL at: http://www.google.com/addurl/ It will probably take around 1-2 months for your site to be indexed.

Yahoo!
Submit your URL at: http://www.yahoo.com/ It will take about 1-2 months for your site to be indexed.

MSN
Submit your URL at: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. If your site was submitted and appears in Yahoo, MSN will automatically index your site even if you don't submit to their directory.

In conclusion, the best way to perform a search engine submission is to visit the directory and manually submit your URL by hand. Be patient and return to check on your submission status after a month. Continue to work on getting inbound links to your website. Even if you do submit your site to several search engines and it does not get listed at first - it will eventually. The key, besides a manual search engine submission, is to work on getting quality links to your website. Over time a spider will eventually find links to your pages when it follows through links from a different website.

Next: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)