Regretfully, I still see people paying big bucks to search engine submission services who will submit their pages to thousands of search engines for one "low price." What they aren't told is that act of "submitting" their pages has nothing to do with top search engine rankings. Even taking a step back, submitting doesn't guarantee indexing.

Fact: The majority of traffic to your site will come from major search engines like Google, Yahoo! search engine, and MSN. Therefore, submitting to "thousands" of search engines really isn't doing your site any good.

Let's take a serious look at reality of search engine submissions. Do we need to pay a submission service to submit our pages to search engines? Can search engines find our pages on their own, or do we have to pay them to index our pages? Let's look at variables and try to save you some money.

Search Engine Submissions . . . Ways to Submit Your Pages

1. Don't submit! Let search engines find your pages through links on other Web pages or Web sites.

To be honest, this is my favorite, most "stress-free" way to submit to search engines. Think about it. You create your Web page and optimize it. You make sure to link TO page from another page on your site, such as your site map. The idea is that when search engine spiders your site map, it should find link to your new page, visit page, spider it, and index it. Can I guarantee it will happen? Of course not. That's why you need to monitor your spider traffic and your rankings to make sure that page makes it into search engine's index.

Search engine spiders were created to SPIDER Web. That's their "job" -- to crawl Web and index new pages. I have always found this method of "submitting" to be most effective.

2. Submit pages through free add URL pages at various search engines.

My main concern here is that search engines have always said that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. I have never wanted my submissions to be lumped in there with all of that spam.

Therefore, I personally stay away from free add URL pages. In particular, I never submit to Google through its free add URL page.

3. Use Overture's Site Match to submit to Yahoo!'s family of search engines.

Use your computer to send personalized color postcards in quantities of 1 to 1,000. Print on demand postcards are here. You can quickly, easily, and economically use your computer to prepare and address color postcards that will arrive in your prospect’s morning mail! Postal mail is growing in importance as volume of e-mail steadily increases. A four-color postcard in morning mail will attract far more attention than same message sent via e-mail.

What you can do

Here are some of ways you can profit from this new technology:

•Networking follow-up. Quickly follow-up with prospects you meet at B.N.I. or Chamber of Commerce events, reminding them to visit your web site.

•Thank You’s. Express your thanks to new clients and those who provide referrals and testimonials.

•Turn postal addresses into e-mail addresses. Give previous customers a reason to joint your e-mail newsletter list.

•New prospects. Profile your best customers and use a list broker to locate names and addresses of others like them.

•Promotions. Invite clients and prospects to teleclasses and special events.

•New Content. Let clients and prospects know when you post new web content.

•Greeting cards. Use postcards to keep in touch at anniversaries and holidays.

Building your e-mail list