Many people want to know “how do I submit my site to a search engine?” and some people even go on to purchase services which will submit their website to a search engine on a monthly basis (for a monthly fee of course). If you are one of these people I have three words for you…. “Don’t do it!”.

Read on and learn a little bit more about the search engines and how they work before going off and paying for some search engine submission service that will probably do absolutely nothing for you apart from cost you money.

First of all, the main search engines are:

• Google (approx 69% of the searches)
• Yahoo (approx 19% of the searches)
• MSN (approx 8% of the searches)

None of these search engines require you to submit your website to them.

Why not…? The reason is that these search engines find websites by themselves without the need for anyone to submit them. All of these search engines have software programs known as “spiders” which basically go and visit  (crawl) different websites on the internet, following links on each of these website, which lead to other websites, which lead to more websites and so on.

All you need to do to get your website indexed by a search engine is to get some backlinks to your website. A backlink is simply a live link from one website to your website. There are many easy ways to do this including distributing articles with your resource box in them containing a link to your site, submitting your site to online directories, exchanging links with other websites, distributing an online press release and more.

Once you have been indexed by a search engine there is absolutely no need to submit your website to them once, never mind every single month. Submitting your site to search engines won’t do you any harm (apart from wasting your time or money), but it is not going to do you any good either.

So if you have already started a search engine submission campaign I recommend that you stop immediately and spend your time or money on building good quality backlinks to your website instead.

I hope that answers the common question of “how do I submit my site to a search engine”. The short answer is, “you don’t”.

However, submitting your site to manually edited link directories such as Yahoo Dir and Dmoz is a completely different thing. This will benefit your site and it is a worthwhile exercise.