An Optometrist came to me years ago, desparte to create an image of speedy service, to combat one hour vision centers that were devouring market. When I asked him how long it took him to provide service, his reply was “one week, but I think I can get it down to three days”. Someone looking for glasses in one hour is not going to be thrilled with waiting three days. So I designed a campaign with a headline that read “We take time.” It went on to extoll vital role of vison in our lives and why it’s important to wait to make sure an eyeglass prescription is done right by a professional. The doctor felt I had completely missed his point, but he trusted my judgement and ran campaign. The phone began to ring and one lady said “I haven’t had my prescription filled because I was waiting to find someone who took more than one hour to ‘grind’ my glasses”. He has run ad for over 15 years and “taking time” has now become his position in market. His revenue, share and bottom line all increased when he became comfortable and congruent with who he was and what he did best- regardless of market.

Transforming a company or brand from mediocre to magnetic requires refocusing on passion that created it and aligning all else around it. Rather than chasing market, market will find you. And that makes work, and life in general, much more attractive.

Site Match gets your pages into Yahoo! Web pages, FAST, AltaVista, Overture supplemental results, HotBot, and more, so visibility is certainly impressive. It's important to note that Site Match pages are shown with regular Yahoo! crawler results with no distinction between two.

If a page is important to you and you're having problems getting it picked up by Yahoo!'s family of search engines, you may want to consider Site Match. However, it can certainly get expensive if you have a number of pages to submit.

4. Do we need software programs or search engine submission services that will submit our pages to thousands of search engines for one "low price"?

In a word -- NO!

We've already learned that majority of traffic comes from major search engines. Submitting to important international or minor engines through a software program like WebPosition Gold 3 (http://www.webposition.com/gold.htm) is a consideration. But submitting to thousands of search engines, many of which are "free for all" Web sites (pure junk), won't benefit your site at all.

Save your money!

5. All of this is fine and good, but what if site is brand new with no inbound links?

Get your site listed in a directory such as Yahoo! Directory (http://www.yahoo.com/) or Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org). Then, spend some time finding a few sites that will agree to put links on their sites to yours.

Are there any vertical search engines and directories in your topic area? Visit Search Engine Guide and search through their topical search engine directory: http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html

So, take stress-free approach with search engine submissions and . . .

1) Link to all of your important pages from another page on your site.

2) Get inbound links from another site pointing to your site.

2) Let major engines find your pages on their own.

3) Monitor your progress. If a search engine hasn't indexed one of your pages, make sure to place additional links to that page in pathway of spiders.

Important Note: You may be using an SEO company to handle optimization of your Web pages, including your search engine submissions. Does this mean you're paying too much for those SEO services? No. SEO work is extremely complex and time consuming, and a good search engine optimizer is helping to make your online business a success. The purpose of this article is to educate you on search engine submissions in general, since so many people wrongly believe that acting of submitting pages will get those pages to top of search engine rankings.

In Conclusion . . .

So many Web site owners and SEOs make search engine submissions much harder than they have to be. Take a deep breath, direct spiders through your Web site to make sure they are able to find your Web pages, and relax. Let search engines do what they do best . . . spider Web!