If you have a brand new website, waiting for a spider to crawl it may be destructive to your plans. In addition, there’s no guarantee that the spider will pick up your pages during a crawl. Here’s where a regular submission may be of some use.

Remember, submission does not guarantee a listing and listing does not guarantee a ranking. But once you are listed, things fall more into your control because now you know the search engine knows about you and you can try to improve your rankings with the help of optimization, link popularity improvement, etc.

Before you submit your pages, ensure that you include a rigid and detailed site map into your site structure! Then submit only the home page, all the other content-rich sections of your site will be found. If they aren’t, try submitting them separately.

With several search engines, it’s only possible to get a paid listing. Review the search engine relationship chart from Part 1 and decide whether getting your site listed in this engine is worth the money they ask for, i.e. whether your listing will then appear in other targeted search engines which can also become sources for traffic.

Let’s walk through some basic and interesting submission strategies that you might want to try.
1. One suggestion is to submit new pages to Yahoo! Site Match (now known as Yahoo! Search Submit Express, available at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse.php), pay the $49 submission fee and wait until the page is well ranked. Then, shut down the Site Match. By that time, the Yahoo! search engine itself should be spidering the page. You may slip down slightly in the rankings once you shut down Site Match, but the rankings should come back, especially if you optimize well.

2. When you’re developing a brand new website, you want traffic and exposure as soon as possible. After completing all the optimization steps described earlier in this course and building a good site map, submit your home page to Yahoo! Search. Since the site is brand new, you may want to consider the Yahoo! Search Marketing “Search Submit Express” program, which will help you get the pages you submit into the Yahoo! index in around a week. Keep in mind that this is a cost-per-click program which will charge you according to the number of hits your link receives. Don’t worry, if a site is brand new, it won’t attract too many unwanted hits. Then, submit to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Submit to any vertical directories or search engines in your topic area. Submit to About.com if the site fits. Spend some time building the site’s link popularity (discussed in one of the following steps).

Submitting to the Yahoo! Directory will help with your link popularity when it comes to calculating the Google Page Rank for your pages. By this time, Google should begin finding the site through links on other pages. Monitor your ranking progress with the help of Web CEO.

Shut down any PPC / paid listing programs you have as soon as you get potentially high rankings, and continue increasing your search engine positions by updating and optimizing your pages. Of course, you shouldn’t shut down the PPC programs if you’re serious about making them a key part of your overall marketing strategy.

3. Let’s imagine you’ve got an existing site, and you’ve created a number of content-rich pages and optimized them and now you want to get them indexed and ranked by the engines. First, if the main page of the site and the site map are already in Yahoo!, do nothing. Yahoo!’s spider will find, crawl, and index the new pages on its next spider run - same as with Google. What you should take care in doing is building good link popularity. Get as many links as possible from high-ranked pages on other domains with high Page Rank values.

Safety of submission

If you break some search engine submission rules your URL may be “banned“. In fact, nowadays this is not quite true with most search engines. However, a safe, sound and accurate tactic is to comply with search engine submission guidelines. It is a waste of time to submit your site to Arianna (Italy) if it accepts sites written only in Italian and your site is entirely in English. It’s also a waste of time and traffic to submit all your pages if a search engine accepts only a certain number of pages per day.

Good submission software should always use a knowledgeable technique which allows you to filter-out inappropriate engines at the very beginning of a search process, something that Web CEO does for you.

In fact we do not recommend resubmitting a page at all. Prepare yourself to wait for a month and more. Actually it takes at least 4 to 6 weeks for a page to make it into a search engine’s index if you use free URL submission, so you have to give it time.

If your site has a page that, in your opinion, can’t get indexed, submit it manually through either free add URL or paid inclusion. Make sure that page is listed on your site map and elsewhere throughout your site. Put links to that page on other sites you might have. If possible, build link popularity for that page.

Don’t hurry to resubmit or make any changes to the page if it has dropped away from the search engine index and you can’t find it anymore. Remember the crawling period of the search engine and wait until the spider crawls the Web again. Alternatively the search engine may be performing a database update. In both cases, your page should reappear soon. If it doesn’t, check your directory listings and restore them, if necessary; then look carefully at your page and make sure it does not apply any of the techniques that may seem suspicious to your targeted search engine. Check the incoming links for this page from your site map and from other domains that earlier contained a link to this page.

If a considerable period of time passes and nothing happens, save this page under a different name, refresh the links sitewide and, if possible, update the external links from other domains that pointed to this page earlier, then submit it to the search engines anew.

Excessive submission

Submitting a site too many times is a topic that is often discussed on the Web. The first thing to remember is that there is no reason to submit a site if it’s already listed. If you are having trouble getting particular pages picked up then you can submit these but submitting pages already listed is a waste of time.

There is no ranking boost based on when a page is submitted. Although search engines offer the option to submit pages, most don’t want to give your submission priority in their crawling, indexing and ranking processes. No engine out there is going to offer any benefits for submission.

While in the past search engines penalized for excessive submission, this is no longer the case. Rather, now it’s simply ignored.

Using automatic submission software is a different story, as well as with the ranking check, which we discuss later. Google wouldn’t appreciate automatic submissions. Google wouldn’t like anything automatic. So, if you were to use software which applies no restrictions to resubmission of your site again and again, you may find that you (your IP address, to be exact) are banned from using Google. That’s why it’s important to choose submission software carefully and ensure that it will control the submission process and observe compliance to search engine rules.