This post is aimed at those who are trying to promote their own websites, but even if you are writing content for someone else, you can still make use of these submission links to help promote your work.

Though using proper keywords and meta tags are the right way to getting your website to rank high in search engine results, your first step to even getting a major search engine to notice you, is to let them know you exist.

Submitting sites to search engines used to the usual way to get included, but with the explosion of new websites being created each and every day, most search engines rely on spiders and robots instead. These programs travel through the Internet independently, indexing new sites as they are discovered.

But if your site is brand new, there may be no other sites linking to you, meaning the spiders aren’t going to find you any time soon.

So, though its not the mainstay of the engines anymore, you can still submit your site to their indexes. But be aware, it can take weeks (months) before you site is actually added. And several engines have their links for submission buried where you may not find them.

Here are some details on how and where to submit your site to the major search engines:

Submit Your Site to Google

According to Google: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.”

You only need to add your main page (including the http:// part of the URL). Google’s spiders will access the rest of your site from there.

Submit Your Site to Yahoo!

This page has links to various submission options with Yahoo! The first link allows you to submit your site to the search engine for free. But for a fee, you can guarantee your quick inclusion (link to Search Submit). The link at the very bottom allows you to add your site to the directory portion of Yahoo! for free.

Submitting Your Site to Ask.com

Ask.com doesn’t support direct site submissions, but rather uses an open-format sitemap protocol. This is probably more confusing to novice website owners, but may be useful for those who are more experienced. I believe you would need to create a sitemap, and then submit that to the sitemap.org website.

Submitting Your Site to the Open Directory Project (ODP)

The ODP site is run by volunteer category editors, so your submission will be dealt with whenever the editor for the relevant category gets to reviewing it. You’ll need to choose the correct category, and submit your URL through that page. This page gives full instructions for your submissions.

One final note: you have likely seen websites offering the service of submitting your site to “hundreds” of search engines. While you can use these services if you like, they are not going to be that helpful. Most of the sites they submit too are not well-known or well-used search engines, and may actually hurt your overall ranking. If your site is added to “link farms” (sites containing useless masses of links), you will do yourself more harm than good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.