You’ve built your website and launched it – good for you! Now you need to get your website indexed by the search engines so that targeted traffic can find it. For example, let’s say you build your website but it’s doesn’t place well in the search engines and so you land up on page 10 of the search. That’s about the same as building your business out in a farmer’s field and wondering why no one comes to your store.

The first thing you need to do is get your website into the search engines, especially the main ones like Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, Excite, and Lycos. Of course, there are tons of other directories. Make an effort to submit your website to as many of the main ones as possible. Don’t worry once the big search engines are aware of your site it will filter down into the smaller ones.

You should submit your home page and any other main pages that you want to see as landing pages. These six search engines are the best ones to submit to, and they are the most popular with web surfers.

Whatever you do, don’t fall for those offers that offer to submit your site to thousands of search engines and numerous directories, all for a small fee. It’s not that they don’t do what they say it’s simply that there is no need to spend the money. Once your site is indexed by the larger ones, it will filter through to the smaller ones. In addition, many of the search engines that they would submit your site are of no value. So while it sounds great that they are offering 7000 search engines (or whatever the number may be) it really has not bearing on the indexing of your site.

 Here’s what you need to submit:

 Google: Start your submission with Google!

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

With Google you can submit a URL, so you can submit your home page but along with a handful of other important internal pages. The more pages you get indexed with the spiders the better the chances of you showing up on a SERP.

Yahoo:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

 With Yahoo, you must first register before you can submit your URL. You can submit to about six directories. Some have fees associated with them. Register for your free account and use the link to submit your URL.

 Bing:

 http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

 Bing is Microsoft’s search engine and it likes it when you just submit your homepage’s URL. It will detect the rest of your pages with its own crawler.

When you see your website first show up in the search engines, you will feel like you have just made it big in the movies. Enjoy it!