Search Engine Submissions

The act of submitting specific URLs to popular search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! to ensure the web page get indexed is called search engine submissions. Search Engine Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site. There are two basic reasons to submit a web site or web page to a search engine. The first reason is to add an entirely new web site because the site operators would rather not wait for a search engine to discover them. The second is to have a web page or web site updated in the respective search engine.

How web sites are submitted
There are two basic methods still in use today that would allow search engine submissions. They can either submit one web page at a time. Or, they can submit their entire site at one time with a sitemap. However most of the times, with just submitting the home page, most search engines are able to crawl a site, provided that it is crawler friendly.

In order to get a good placement in various search engines, webmasters must optimize their web pages. Many variables come into play, such as the placement and density of desirable keywords, the hierarchy structure of web pages employed in a web site, the number of web pages that link to a given web page etc. The Google search engine also uses a concept called page rank.

Google Sitemaps was introduced in June 2005 so web developers could publish lists of links from across their sites. The sitemap is used to make the search engine aware of the site and the pages on the site. At this moment XML sitemap support Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN. The location of the Sitemap can also be specified using a robots.txt file to help search engines find the sitemaps

Web sites desire to be listed in popular search engines because that is how most people access web sites. People like to search for information on the web at what is known as a search engine. Sites that appear on the first page of a search are said to be in the top 10. Clicking on a hyperlink causes the found web page to appear in the searchers web browser.

What Exactly Is Involved In Search Engine Submission
Many people think search engine submission is the act of submitting your website’s URL, to the search engines so that they know your website exists, list you in their index and start sending traffic your way. At the most basic assumption is true but there are a number of flaws which reveal Search Engine Submission to be little more than a meaningless “hello” to the search engines. First, search engines mostly find websites by following hyperlinks from other sites .That’s why quality webpage content and quality links are extremely important in order to succeed online. The fact that a search engine knows you exist, doesn’t mean that it will simply “send” traffic your way. Search engines have millions and sometimes billions of sites indexed, so why would they think your site is so special that they would bypass all other sites to send traffic your way. Just as there are potentially billions of pages in the indexes of the search engines that matter there are sometimes millions of other pages with content similar to yours with whom you’ll be competing against for search engine traffic. So, even if you do submit your URL to the search engines it is still highly unlikely that they will start sending significant traffic your way.