So what do you do? I mean, a webmaster should really be spending most of his time designing and creating his web pages, shouldn't he? Well, actually, yes and no. Promotion is a major part of being a webmaster - a site must be seen in order to be successful (otherwise why bother at all). Thus a webmaster must promote his site, and he should be spending some time on this practice every single day.

Of course, it would be silly to hand-submit your site to thousands of search engines and hundreds of thousands of FFA (Free for All List) pages.

One course of action is to hand submit your site to major search engines, then use submission services to submit it to medium sized and smaller ones. Don't forget about directories, especially Yahoo, Looksmart and DMOZ. These are very critical to getting traffic to your site.

There are many programs and services available to help you submit your site. Some of these are good, others are a complete waste of time and money.

Submit Wolf http://www.submitwolf.com/ This is a program into which you enter your site name, URL and details. The program then can be used to perform automatic submissions to thousands of search engines and FFA lists.

WebPosition Gold http://www.webposition.com Probably best way to get your site listed well in major search engines. This product combines every tactic into one concise and easy-to-use package.

Jim's Tools http://www.jimtools.com/ This awesome site includes a full suite of tools to help you submit your site to search engines, FFA lists and directories. Highly recommended.

Everything which submits to FFA pages You will find hundreds (or even thousands) of services which claim to submit to thousands, tens of thousands or even more "search engines". Actually, what they are doing is submitting to FFA pages. FFA pages are completely worthless as a promotional technique, and thus all of these services are pure garbage. Don't even bother wasting a minute looking at them.

I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other site submission services available. I look at them all with caution, as most of them are highly overpriced and many use or promote unethical submission practices (search engine spamming).

After working on it for a while, I decided to switch my focus to other promotion methods and get back to optimizing my site later. As I knew that both of them were good traffic providers, I chose to spend time I had to submitting site to both Yahoo and DMOZ. Fortunately, my submissions were accepted and site was added to both directories after a while. A few weeks passed and I begun to see referrals not only from Yahoo and DMOZ, but also from Google in my logs. I went back to check my rankings and noticed that they had vastly improved. And then it dawned on me..

I went back to DMOZ and managed to get another sub-section of same site listed. I waited for a couple of weeks for Google to reindex and WHAM! This sub-section went from nowhere to be found to a Top 15 ranking on a competitive keyphrase with over half a million returns. The only thing that had changed was that page was now listed at DMOZ.

This incident inspired me, so I went and looked if same principle could be applied to other engines as well. I noticed that nearly all of them appeared to give weight to directory listings, but if search engine happened to be affiliated with a certain directory, it was extremely important to be listed in said directory in order to rank high. With Google, this directory was DMOZ, with Excite it was Looksmart and so on. Sites that were listed in right directories appeared to have a definite advantage against sites that weren't.

My conclusion would be that days when search engines and directories could be treated as separate entities are now gone. If you want to achieve high traffic, you're going to have to tackle both at same time. The traditional search engine optimization methods - a keyword-intensive copy, meta tags, link popularity and so on - are far from being dead, but there definitely is a new major factor in play that you should account for.