The first thing people do after creating a website is to open Google and search for search engine submission software or service. Interestingly they look for a free search engine submission service, but alas end up paying for actually a no service.

What is search engine submission? (A layman’s perspective)

A process of submitting a website to search engines so that they “know” the website exists and should be considered while displaying search results.

And a misconception they have is that if they submit their site to search engines the website will be ranked well and therefore will start getting good traffic.

Reason why people search for search engine submission software is that they feel a software will automate the process and save time.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Search engine submission is just that – search engine submission. Its NOT search engine optimization.

People don’t seem to understand the difference. Search engine submission is submitting the websites to the search engines and search engine optimization is the process (a long process) to optimize the website in a way that they get top rankings in the search engines for some good business related keywords.

Search engine submission will take you a minute, while search engine optimization may take months or even years.

Coming back to the topic of the post – is search engine submission required? The short answer is Yes and NO. Whatever the case may be, one thing is for sure – search engine submission software is NOT required.

Before answering the question in detail let me tell you in very very brief how search engines work.

Search engines keep a copy (or backup) of most websites in their databases. Once someone submits a query, they look in their database and return links to relevant webpages in their search results. The most relevant page will get the first rank, the next relevant the second …. so on and so forth.

Huh, that was too brief really!

Read this carefully – if a website is “in” the database of a search engine, there is absolutely no need to submit it to that search engine. But if it isn’t, search engine submission is required.

How to know if a website is in the database of the search engine?

Open your favorite browser.

Visit the search engine.

Type the URL of your website in the search box.

Hit enter.

If the site is in its database, the search engine will show the URL of the website in the search result. In most cases the site will be in the first position.

If the site is not its database, it may show some other websites’ URL or show that the search did not match any documents / site may not exist / did not find any results for ***.

For example cnn.com is in the database of all three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Live (MSN).

Click on the following links to see the result for cnn.com:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=cnn.com
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cnn.com
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cnn.com

Now let’s check if website cnn0123456789.com exists in the database of these search engines. I am sure such a website does not exist, so it won’t be there in their databases.

Click on the following links to see the result for cnn0123456789.com:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=cnn0123456789.com
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cnn0123456789.com
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cnn0123456789.com

So if you are the owner of “cnn0123456789.com”, you may need to submit the website to the search engines once the website is live.

Here is something interesting. Search engines are themselves eager to find new sites. The reason is simple – they will have more scope to improve their search results. Bigger their database means more information for the users.

More than you, the search engines want to find about your website and take a copy in their database.

How do they do this?

To know about new websites, the search engines follow the links present in the websites. Say for example A.com is in the database of a search engine and it has a link to B.com, the search engines will know about the site B.com and keep a copy of B.com in their database. Similarly if B.com has a link to C.com – this site also will be known by the search engines.

There is a way to tell the search engines not to follow a link, however this is beyond the scope of the article.

Until unless specified, the search engines do follow the links.

Read this carefully. If your site is linked from any site that is present in the database of the search engine, they will follow the link and know about your site. In that case there is NO need to submit the site to that particular search engine.

However if no site is linking to your site and you don’t see it in their search results, you may need to submit the site to search engine.

Note that for some strange reason sometimes the search engines know about a site even if it isn’t linked from any other site. (I presume that the domain registrars inform them. But this is just an assumption. There may be some other reason.)

If you need to submit a site to the search engines you can search the engine themselves, or look for a submission link.

If you want to submit a site to Google, Yahoo! and Live (MSN), here are the links:

1. Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/

2. Submit to Yahoo! – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

3. Submit to Live (MSN)! – http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

NOTE: Please read the search engine’s guidelines carefully before submitting your site. You may need to submit the home page ONLY. Rest of the pages will be crawled by the search engines themselves. Please don’t use any search engine submission software. The search engines do not like it. They prefer manual website submission. There is no need of any search engine submission service provider either, as submission to these search engines is easy and free.

I hope this article will help you to understand search engine submission better and help you to avoid costly mistakes.

You views are important for growth of this blog. Please leave a comment and let me know what you would like to read in this blog.

Related Topics:
 
1. Search Engine Optimization in a Nutshell
2. How to Find Inbound Links in Google and Yahoo!
3. How to Get Great Incoming Links