It is straight forward and simple to submit a web site for free to the search engines and a task that can be done in a few minutes. However, there are plenty of companies offering search engine submission services, these services re-submit your web site to the search engines periodically for a given time period. It amazes me that these services exist and amazes me more why people pay for them.

Google states on its web master pages that re-submitting your web site to the search engine does not make a difference to a sites ranking or to how quickly the site appears in the rankings and from experience this is also true in Yahoo! and MSN.

Why submit your site to the search engines?

Submitting your web site to the search engine will make your web site visible to its robot. A search engine robot is a web spider that runs across the internet, indexing web pages one at a time, following links it finds on other web pages. The submission of your web site to the search engine will inform these robots to index your site. How quickly the robot indexes your web site depends on the search engine, so no guarantees can be made.

Once your web site has been indexed the search engine may rank your site relevant for certain keywords it has picked up on, although these are not taken from your keywords meta data. Again, this is not a guarantee and can take months (especially if it is Google) before your site is visible to search engine users.

How do you know when your web site has been indexed?

The first indication of this can be seen in your web analysis tool, usually under the section marked robots/spider visits. If you do not have such a tool, id recommend installing AW Stats which is free and will accomplish most peoples needs, or you can search through your web sites log files for the IP addresses of the search engine spiders. The main IP addresses to look out for are:

• Google - will be seen as Googlebot

• Yahoo - will be seen as Inktomi Slurp

• MSN - will be seen as MSNBot

site:www.yoursite.com

Replace www.yoursite.com for the web address of your web site.

If the search engine returns your web site then it means you have been successfully added to its index and can be found by search engine users. However, if your web site does not appear be patient it may take a while.

How to improve the chances of being indexed?

It is possible although not guaranteed to speed up the inclusion of your web site to the search engines by having their spiders find your web site before actually submitting your web site to the engine. This can be done by having a web site that has already been indexed link back to your web site.

This can be done in several ways, some are examples are to have your web site address as part of your signature in a forum, or by having your web design company give you a link as part of their portfolio.

In my experience this has helped considerably, and is always favorable to submitting a web site manually to the search engines. Although, there is nothing wrong with manually submitting your web site!

Is using a submission service bad for my web site?

This does depend on how the company submits your web site to the search engine. Search engines have become good at distinguishing between manual submissions and bulk automated submissions usually made from these types of services (sometimes having different URLs available), normally when a search engine detects a bulk web site submission it will usually process them slower than manual submissions.

What search engines should I submit to?

Be extremely wary of web sites that say they can submit your web site to 100s if not 1000s of search engines. The majority of these search engines will not provide you with any traffic and the web site will likely sell on your email address.

You should submit your web site to the following search engines:

• Google

• Yahoo

• MSN

Are there any other web sites my site should be submitted to?

In terms of providing your web site with the best possible start in life you should be trying to submit your web site to the following sites:

• Yahoo! Directory

• Open directory project

Search engine submission is about making your web site visible to the search engine robots. This can be done by manually submitting them to the search engine via their own add site URL or from their robot finding you from another link. Search engine submission services that re-submit your web site are in the end a waste of money.