What’s more, at time of writing, most of top 11 don’t actually accept submissions. The only ones that do are Google (described above), Yahoo, and MSN. Here’s a list of available submit pages.

• Yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (offers free submission)
• MSN – http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 (offers free submission)
• Alta Vista – covered by Yahoo submission
• Netscape – covered by Google submission
• Fast / All Web – covered by Yahoo submission
• Ask Jeeves / Teoma – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Hotbot – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Lycos – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• AOL – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions
• Looksmart – at date of writing was not accepting new submissions

TIP: My SEO copywriting and advertising copywriting website http://www.divinewrite.com reached page 1 of Google.com for my primary keyword, “copywriter”, without a dollar being spent on search engine submission. I only ever submitted my site to engines that offer free submission.

Do I need to submit my site to other search engines?

As a rule, no.

With an estimated 8.8 billion pages indexed (approximately 76% of Internet), Google is number 1 when it comes to search engines. It’s argued that once Google has indexed your site, other search engines will follow. Theoretically, you don’t actually need to submit your site to Google either because it’s always on lookout for new content and will eventually find your site of its own accord. Google actually states, “Given large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through URL submission form.” (“Google Information for Webmasters” - http://www.google.com.au/webmasters/1.html#A1) Personally, I wouldn’t like to take risk.)

Having said that, it certainly doesn’t hurt to submit your site to other search engines (especially if you haven’t developed any content for it yet).

Conclusion

You don’t need to be an SEO expert or an SEO copywriter to submit your site to Google and other search engines. And you don’t need to pay anything to do it. You just need to do it. And if your domain name is new, you need to do it NOW!

Happy submitting!

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

5)Check your Links, Build if necessary Do you have any inbound links pointing to your site? If not, no amount of awesome copy is going to get your site high rankings. Links are very important. And even more so for Google. Go to linkpopularity.com and see what you have. Also check your competitors. If they have more than you, you need to get some high quality links. You can either do that yourself or hire someone to do it for you. It can be time consuming and expensive. But you gotta do it. It makes you look important to search engines. A good way to do it is to make sure you are listed on directories, including DMOZ and industry related sites. Go to incominglinks.com to see which ones you should be listed on. Then write articles and submit them to article submission sites. That could potentially give you hundreds of links for free.

6)Use Go Rank’s Analytical Tools GoRank.com is a fantastic free resource for SEO. They have a Keyword Density Analyzer, Link Popularity Analyzer, Top 10 Keyword Analyzer, Research, News and lots of other great stuff. It’s a great tool and something I use every day. It will help you in your SEO copy efforts.

7)Submit to Search Engines After you’ve ensured that your website copy and all other important SEO considerations have been completed, it’s time to submit to Search Engines. Do it manually. Go to search engine and do it yourself. Definitely don’t pay someone to do it for you. You may have to resubmit a few times, but eventually, your site will get noticed.

8)Tweak Copy as necessary, Add New Content After your site has been up for a while, go back and take a second look. Ask friends and customers what they think of it. Can anything be improved? You’ll be surprised what you may hear. If something isn’t working, fix it. Make it sound better. The other thing that you should also be doing is adding content regularly. Build free resources into your website. This will make your customers and potential customers happy, and it will make you appear to be more important in eyes of search engines. Adding articles to your site is a great way to give your customers new, free content. Write about things that they would find interesting.

9)Partner with a Great SEO Firm You may want to also consider partnering with a great Search Engine Optimization firm. There are probably a hundred very good ones out there. There are also 1000 bad ones. For good ones, check out topseos.com. and marketingsherpa.com. They both list reputable firms. Whoever you go with, make sure they have a list of client success stories complete with stats to back it up.

10)Measure Your Success! Finally, measure your success. (or progress) Get a software program that will provide you with some web metrics as it pertains to your site. WebTrends and Statcounter are great ones. There are quite a few others as well.

As you can see, Search Engine Optimized copy is only part of overall SEO story. There is a lot to it, so make sure you cover every area. After all, we want to get your web site to very top!