SEO Step 6: Submit to Search Engines

To be ranked in search engines, they must know that your site exist. The natural tendency is to submit your site to the search engines as soon as it is up. Interestingly, search engines are likely to penalize you for using their free "submit your site" service for the following reasons: First, many webmasters use the "submit a site" feature to continuously submit their URL's to the search engine, and this is considered spam. Second, search engines prefer to having their spiders find you first by following a link from another site. This would speak about the quality of your site. This speaks to the importance of getting listed in directories, as the spiders already crawl them regularly.

For your reference, here are the links for submitting your web site to the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo (you will need to login as a Yahoo user to submit your URL), and MSN.

If your site is in English, this is pretty much all you need to do, as all other search engines either use one of the above three as their search backend provider, or their query share is simply miniscule. On the other hand, if your site is in another language, there may be other search engines that you should submit to. Below is a short list:

• China: Baidu
• Korea: Naver, Nate, and Daum
• France: Wanadoo/Voila
• Germany: T-Online
• Italy: Virgilio, IOL