Search engine marketing, coupled with search engine optimization practices, is a great way to grow your business online. Once you develop your site with search engine friendly content and you have your design in place and your keywords selected, it’s time to submit your site to the search engines themselves.

  Search engine submission is the process of registering your site with the search engines, similar to getting your phone number listed in a phone book. Listing your site with the major search engines will help you ensure that your optimization efforts were worthwhile. Although your site may be noticed by search engines on its own, you can ensure that you appear in search results by taking the time to get listed.

  Free Submission
You can submit to all of the major search engines for free, but that won’t guarantee that they’ll be picked up or appear on any searches. Free submission only guarantees that the search engine knows the site exists. To go the route of free submissions, look for a “Submit Your Site” link on the search engine site and fill out a submission form. It can take up to 12 weeks for your site to be indexed.

  Paid Listings and Services
Most major search engines accept paid listings, a unique form of online marketing that ensures your site will be listed near the top of search results pages. Paid submissions probably are the most efficient way for site owners to quickly gain visibility, and they're a great long-term advertising method for those looking to generate continuous online sales.

  Search engine submission services like Submitnet submit your site to as many search engines as possible. For a fee, the service automatically submits your site to multiple search engines each month. This can help take some of the legwork out of the process for you, but it may not guarantee a quick listing. There are also software programs available that you can use to handle the submission process, like Trellian’s SubmitWolf, Dynamic Software’s Dynamic Submission, and WebTrends’ WebPosition Gold.

  Submitting your site to search engines is the easiest way to ensure that they’re aware your site exists and that users can easily find your site. Submitting your site to search engines puts you on the map, but designing and optimizing your site will help make sure people find it. If you take the time to do each part of the process correctly, your chances of successfully growing your business online will increase dramatically.

  What kind of search marketing is best?
While all of these methods will give your site more visibility, what’s best for you depends on your business. For example, if you sell a fairly unique item like African Violets, you may be able to optimize your site using natural search techniques and achieve top ranking with popular search engines.

Optimizing your site for natural search requires time, effort, and an investment, however. If you’re not familiar with programming, hiring an outside source may be necessary.

If you sell a fairly common product like roses, however, you probably won't be able to naturally optimize your site to achieve a top ranking on most search engines. Because there are so many other web sites out there selling the same product, it will probably take a little extra effort (or money) to get a higher ranking. In this case, it might make most sense to focus your efforts on one of the paid search vehicles.

As more customers go online to find the products and services they want, incorporating search engine marketing into your business plan is the best way to grow your business online. The more people that can find your site, the more likely you are to sell your products to a larger audience, and, in many instances, a combination of natural search and paid search will significantly help your site get noticed.

We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. 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.

Please enter your full URL, including the http:// prefix. For example: http://www.google.com/. You may also add comments or keywords that describe the content of your page. These are used only for our information and do not affect how your page is indexed or used by Google.

Please note: Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. Our crawler, Googlebot, will be able to find the rest. Google updates its index on a regular basis, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. Dead links will 'fade out' of our index on our next crawl when we update our entire index.
  Your business’ web site is no different from a physical storefront. To experience the most success, you have to have a good location and advertise. Small business owners often think of their web sites as marketing vehicles, but they don’t also think about the “location” and the promotion of that site. While it is a great resource, if no one can find your site, it won’t attract the most customers possible.

  Using search engine marketing, it’s easy to start promoting your site and expanding your reach. Search marketing probably is the most cost-effective method of advertising on the Web, allowing you to reach the largest possible audience for the least amount of money.
 In search engine marketing, the normal rules of advertising are reversed: instead of a business sending its ads blindly to a mass audience, consumers tell advertisers what they want by entering words in a search engine like Yahoo!, Google or MSN, then the ads appear on a search results page. Consumers who are already looking for a particular product are more likely to click on the ads once they appear.