Why You Probably Don't Need to Submit to Search Engines

This is going to sound crazy: you may not need to submit to search engines.

How could that be the case? Aren't search engines an important part of the whole process of optimizing your website?

The short answer is "yes". The longer answer is that while search engines are crucial to optimizing your website, you probably don't need to take the time to manually submit to them. This article is simply an explanation of this longer answer. It ends with a brief characterization of strategies for getting the search engines to see your website, without you having to submit to them!

Out of the many, you need only a few

There are way too many search engines out there. For the purposes of driving traffic to your website(s), the reality is that you only need a few. That said, why take the time and money necessary to submit to ALL the search engines? That's right-some search engines, especially the lesser-known search engines, require a fee to submit to.

From what I can tell in visiting the most renowned SEO-related forums (in particular, the digital point forums), webmasters agree that the biggies are Google.com (of course), Yahoo.com, AltaVista.com, and MSN.com. There are a couple more that you could submit to (and see this article if you're interested in these additional search engines), but they won't drive nearly as much traffic as the big three.

Given enough time, most search engines will do your work for you

If you give Google.com about a month, you'll notice that it indexes your website for you. How do I know? I know because it indexed my blog in about that time. Of course, being part of wordpress.com's domain had something to do with it, but from the research I've done, webmasters seem to agree that if you have optimized content (in terms of keyword density) and enough content, Google.com (and the other important ones) will pick you up.

According to this article, search engines start at the websites with the most outgoing links and work there way to the individual websites associated with those links.