You’ve probably seen the advertisements - submit your website to 1000’s of search engines for one small fee. You may have even been tempted to try it, after all, inclusion in that many search engines must be a bargain!

Don’t be fooled. There are really only 3 major search engines; google, yahoo and MSN. Current research from comscore shows google has the lions share of search traffic at 43.7%, yahoo at 28.8% and MSN at 12.8%. All the rest only get 14.7% combined. And google’s share is still growing.

So, you would be wasting your time and money. If you are convinced you must submit your website to search engines, only do so to google, yahoo and MSN. But if you want my advice, you wont do that either.

Instead, you should link to your site from at least 2 or 3 popular, authority sites in your niche. Google will ’spider’ these sites frequently and see your new link, follow it to your site and include your site in it’s index.

And this can happen quickly. When I started this blog, I submitted my site to technorati, the blog directory. Within a few days I was in google’s search index. It can be that fast. Posting every day helps too.

The search engines like to find you. So, if you’ve built a brand-new site, get a handful of links to get yourself indexed. Most search engines use google’s search database, so you only really need to consider google, and getting indexed in google.

There is only one place I would submit a new website, and that’s dmoz. It’s an open source project directory and is staffed by real people who check and approve your submission before inclusion. But this directory is very popular and gets a lot of traffic, so it’s worth doing.