One of the biggest myths of search engine optimization is that you need to submit your site - often multiple times - to search engines. You’ll often find companies or software packages that will claim that for a monthly fee, they’ll submit your site to search engines each month.

These types of services are scams, and in fact, can get your site banned from search engines.

The truth is that the best way to make sure you get included in search engines is to get a link from a site that’s already listed in search engines (and the more links the better!). Then, as Google, Yahoo, or MSN crawl that website, they’ll see a link to your website and follow it.

Why are Links Important?
In-bound links (links from other websites) help search engines determine what a website is about and how authoritative it is. If a site that Google already sees as important on a particular topic links to you, it gives your site more credibility. The more links you get from sites relevant to your content, the more Google sees your site as relevant for that topic and boosts your rank.

That said, there are certain types of links that can harm you. In my article on black hat search engine optimization, I mention link farms. Search engines see link farms as “bad neighborhoods” on the web that have no useful content and have been created for the sole purpose of gaming the system. If you end up linking to a bunch of sites in a link farm, Google will associate your website as part of their network and penalize or even ban you.

What About Free Search Engine Submission Tools?
Each major search engine has a free submission tool (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) that will allow you to add your url to their database and eventually crawl your site.

There are a handful of search engine marketers out there that think that submitting your site via these tools can actually harm your site in rankings. I haven’t seen any evidence of this and have a difficult time believing that search engines would deliberately try to mislead people. That said, if no one is linking to your website, you aren’t going to rank very well. Sites that end up on the first page have lots of relevant links.

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