You have a website, what now?

So you have a nice website with lots of great content about a certain subject and now you want to get visitors; How do you do it? One of the most important things you can do is to register with the search engines so they know your site exists and what it is all about.

Search engines love new websites.

They love to explore them and understand what is on them. They guide people to the information they need. For example: You go to a search engine and are looking for information on J.R.R. Tolkien. So you type in J.R.R. Tokien and it gives you a list of websites that have information about him. So search engines are always hungry for more information.

Search engines don't search the web when you ask them to

The search engine didn't go out and look for those websites. It had the information already stored in a database and it got the information from there. So you want to get into that database so that your website shows up in the listing when people are looking for something that is relevant to your site.

What you have to do is register with the search engine. You tell the search engine the name of your website, where it is located, and sometimes you give it keywords that you want affiliated with your site. An example of a keyword would be "J.R.R. Tolkien" or "Astronomy" or Science Fiction or Harry Potter.

Now the search engine says thankyou and at some point in the future it will search through all the available pages of your website and add this information to its database.

Different search engines behave differently. Some search engines will search your site within minutes of you submitting to them. Other search engines can take as long as a month. There are even content specific search engines that will reject your site because it doesn't fit into the theme of the search engine.

So now you are all excited and want to get started

It is real easy to get started. I like to start with a free submission service that submits to a variety of websites. Submit Express is a webservice that has been around a long time and has a free submission service. All you have to do is tell them your website address and your email address. They will submit this information to 40 different search engines. After this is done you will need to check your email. Some of the search engines will require you to manually input more information.

Try it now: SubmitExpress Free search engine submission