Search Engine Submission and SEO
For Inclusion In Search Engine Rankings

In most all cases is not necessary to submit a site. Years ago search engine robots visited sites only every few months. Now the larger engines visit some sites daily or even hourly. Most sites are crawled several times a week.

Their are a few exceptions that would require a site submission to have it crawled. A brand new website with no external inbound links. This mostly applies to a site using a sub or lower level domain. Sites with top level domains .com .net .org etc. will most likely be found with links from registry sites, service providers or other traffic tracking web sites.

The best solution for indexing any site is to post a link to the site. Posting a link on Twitter or another social site is quick and easy. Listing your site in a directory is fine if the directory has related listings and is search friendly. Getting another site to link in also works well, just make sure it is a content related site.

If you choose to submit your site anyway you only need to submit the home page. Do not submit every page on the site. If your links are properly placed the spiders will find all of your pages.

Some advice here, place page links first on your pages in order of importance to users. Do not put a link on site pages back to your homepage first, before the links to the rest of the site. I have had spiders returning to the home page without finding some pages down the line. It is like an endless loop sending the search bot back to the homepage over and over again.

Not all inbound links are good, make sure when possible that sites that link to yours have related content. Links from other sites to yours will improve search rankings much better if they are similar to yours.

Today Google uses 200 signals to rank a site in the results. Although they're mostly a well guarded secret, common sense can give you an insight as to what Google deems important.

1. Good information, I feel content is still king. Your site has to serve a purpose. It must provide the user with information they want and need.
2. Unless your sight is a full blown shopping site. It should not have too many Ads. About 4 on a page is my limit.
3. Good spelling, good grammar and no key word spamming, which is placing key search words all over the page just for the sake of increasing your keyword count.
4. No content related to gambling, smoking, drinking, hate, prejudice or other bad habits.
5. Easy to navigate links an orderly site where things are easy to find. Site maps help here.
6. Privacy policies.
7. Contact links
8. Valid page code HTML, CSS or other page code must be right.
9. Inbound links from other sites.
10. Original content.
11. Fast loading pages.
12. No pop ups or other nag screens.
13. No spam

You can go on yourself, 187 search signals to go. If it bothers you, it will most likely bother Google's search bot.

Certainly there are some very technical signals used that are out of your control. The number of related sites on the internet. World, country, or state search popularity are just some examples. But these things will not stop your site from ranking well if you use common sense. Think like the user, if your trying to trick, annoy or mislead someone your only driving your site lower in the search results. Sure some people have fooled the bots and achieved high ranking for awhile, but one day they all find themselves on page 1,000,000.