What do yous prefer to use to submit your websites to search engine sites such as yahoo.com, google, msn, etc...
Do yous use free software that you can download?
Looking for ideas and results.

I manually submitted my sites to Google, Yahoo. I didn't bother with MSN because for a while it was poweredby Google.

Submitting to Yahoo:

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

About the only other site that I'd worry about is Ask.com Nobody uses any of those other off Broadway search engines. If you're in Google, MSN, and Yahoo, you're good to go.

The key to search engine success is to have good SEO. Make sure you have great page titles, alt text on all of your images, use SEO friendly header tags on all of your pages, don't ignore meta tags. Have a robots.txt doc in the main directory of your website, have a site map.

Not only use alt tags on images, but use title tags on all your text links. Avoid stuffing of keywords.

Your site will be found eventually anyway - I'd worry more about SEO.

What is funny is this - I was going to ask the owners of a blueberry farm near me to let me make a website for them. I designed a mock up site and put it in a directory on my server...my goal was to go in and see them and show them what I could do and get the deal. The text of the site is just this: the word Text repeated over and over with some references to the blueberry farm (whatever I knew about them)

Google found it. In fact, when googling it, my fake site comes up on page two - LOL - but before they actually made their own site, I was on page 1! I never submitted it, but my seo on the graphics, titles, and stuff got it on page one for a long time. Google found it all on its own.

(no, I didn't do their main site, I ended up having a lot of personal issues come up and I gave up my web design business...but my fake site is still up. LOL)

So, you think it is better to just manually submit everything instead of using a trialware program?

In my experience - yes.

I don't know but it might be harmful for your site to use these auto submission sites, if the search engine can see that it's an auto submission it may give it a lot less credibility than a manual submission.

And in case you come across it, do NOT under any circumstances use a web positioning software such as WebPositionGold - you will get BANNED from Google. Just build your site, build it well, and you will do fine.

go to ActiveRain.com and look up Karen George. She does mortgages in Arizona - but she is the SEO and search engine GURU. Her blogs on SEO are an excellent crash course.

Perky, I see you are the 2nd one on ActiveRain's PA page.

Ah! You found me!

Yes. that's me. If you want to join let me send you a link so I get credit for you. lol

People... manually submitting to search engines is an exercise in futility for quite a while now

I clicked on that yahoo link above. I entered my URL (http://www.4saleinbucks.com) and it said:

"Thank you! Your URL has been added to our list of URLs to crawl. Please expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled."

Is this all I have to do? lol I know there is more to this.

I think that they'll just find your site on their own, if you have it done right.

USUALLY. Then there's those occasional sites, like ones in Albequerque, that seem to be cursed by google.

There's plenty of free submit services. http://www.submitpro.com

Article writing will also get your site better ranking.

Perky now that's a thought. I should go for all the different ways to spell Albuquerque. Karen H. says she usually gets hits for all the typos. Google does find me it just treats me "like the b*st*rd at the family reunion" and stick's me next to Aunt Martha from Kalamazoo MI who likes to sell FSBO.

Joey make sure you have a good site map and use Google Webmaster Tools to check that it is Google friendly.

The rules and algorthyms for the search enginges are constantly changing. What is important today, will likely not be that important 90 days from now. I tried to do it for myself but quickly realized I needed professional help if I wanted to stay on top. If you really want to use the website as a main source of contacts, you need to design the site specifically to appeal to the search engines and you need someone to constantly monitor and track the site. Submitting a site and hope it rises is a long term prospect with not very good odds of reaching the top.

That is all you have to do .... easy hey! The hard bit is getting SEO and your overall web strategy right.

Lots of postings here - as i have noticed you are doing - will also get you listed as well ... notice the Page Rank of 4 on this page.

the fastest way of being found by the search engines is having BLs from blogs. Especially G loves blogs.

Just putting your site out there is the best way. look for places you can place your site like chamber websites, bbb, real estate webmasters, etc...

Manually submitting your website is a complete waste of time for a long time now... It's just not the way search engines find or more importantly, rank your site for anything ...

As for rankings ...forget the typical link exchanges that have been all the rage over the past few years... Now more than ever you have to make sure that your site is built correctly with good content structure, proper onsite seo and hand selecting the right links to the right pages... some blogging perhaps ... developing and providing rss feeds from YOUR site to others and much more..

The days of cheating by building massive link farms are over.. If spending that type of time and resources isn't an option then a site designed with lead capture & follow up (as all should be) and a smart PPC campaign can provide a better roi than even the nicest custom site on page 500

An interesting thing you might like to try is Google and Yahoo sponsored search placement. You choose keywords advertising your business, like Oklahoma Real Estate or Tulsa Real Estate, and when someone searches them your website will show up in the sponsored links. It runs on pay-per-click and a small setup fee but you should get more relevant leads than at lendingtree since it's more specific and people go directly to your site after they've searched. Management companies are really inexpensive but will ensure a cost-effective campaign.

lizc .... We frown on the self promoting here.. especially when your first 2 posts are duplicates... Your welcome to provide opinions and share thoughts but lets make a positive contribution and not spam the forums please.

My specialty is online marketing and development and I've been into SEO for a long time. A key is not to automatically submit your websites to the major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Do the auto submit to smaller ones at this place: http://www.freewebsubmission.com/

Another important step is to go to http://www.DMOZ.org. This is the biggest and most important directory. If you get in here (if you are lucky), you will be put into the google and msn directory. This is the ONLY way to get into these directories. Also, if you get your site listed there, you will automatically get into 1000s of smaller directories that use DMOZ as their main content source.

Yahoo is known to penalize or even ban a site for auto submitting to them, and google just ignores this because it's considered spam and bots have abused this auto submit feature. It's best to submit manually.

Secret tip of mine, if you want to get listed on google in a week or even a few days and not months, get a link to your website form someone elses, thats my advice.

Other tips: don't try to trick the search engines to get better results such as cloaking, making text the same color as your back ground, keyword stuffing or meta tag stuffing. The search engine WILL find out about any "black hat SEO" tactics and you will get banned or have massive penalties such as getting crappy rankings. This is from my own experience. Duplicate content is one of the worst ones you can do. By duplicate content, do not copy anyone else's pages or info, Google ESPECIALLY will be able to track this and you will either get a penalty or crap rankings.

do not have the same meta tags on all of your pages. even though search engines don't really rely on keywords for better results, they still check to see if they are duplicated meta tags.

Content is king, make original content straight from your knowledge. Don't get lazy and make your content based off of someone elses, it takes longer and requires more concentration (by trying not to duplicate others content).

A great thing I found out recently is to convert your enter site to CSS. This will clean your code up and make it look more appealing to the search engines. Google doesn't want to look through a code stuffed page, they want to see content and CSS takes a lot of the code away but leaves the design looking the same if not more cleaner and easier to modify later on.

Articles and link exchanges are OK. Just don't buy the 10000 links for $5 because you will get banned or penalized. Anything that looks spammy will hurt you. Get quality link exchanges. One thing you should realize is Google is about to begin a plan to downgrade link exchange relevancy as it is being abused. Read Matt Cutt's (famous guy who works with this stuff at google) blog and you'll be able to read about some of google's most recent plans.

For articles, don't put content that is already on your website into free article submissions. Google will see this as duplicate content and you'll get a rank loss penalty and got page 30 results for my whole site. I have done this recently and learned the hard way. I asked these article places such as Isnare and articledashboard to remove them and immediately google knew this and my ranks went back up to the first page. Just be cautious about articles and who you link to and who links to you.

There is a lot more than just this, check out the forum below in my signature and I can answer any other SEO or online questions you may have. I should be able to help out a lot since I was in the online casino industry, which had the most competitive search engine topics on Earth, so my experience is hardened and online real estate is no where near as competitive. If you have a site like "selling homes in Mankato, Minnesota" or something based locally or regionally, it should be very simple to get top results if you are doing things correctly.

I hope this helps!