An essential part of your website promotional activities is to make sure your website gets listed in as many search engines and directories as possible.
It was tempting to put together a list of websites here that do automated site submissions for you, however submitting to many of these can actually have an adverse affect on the way search engines view your website (you could be seen as spamming them).
Just to make it more difficult, over the past years several of the major search engines have acquired some of the more popular smaller players and the only way you can get listed in them is to submit your website to the major search engine.
Our recommendation is to make sure you submit to the following four search engines and directories manually via their rules and forget the rest.
The fact is that these search engines feed their data into a large number of sites, that produce the majority of the web’s search traffic and the rest just aren’t worth spending the time to find.
Google.com
It goes without saying that is it essential for you to get a listing in google.com, as it is the largest search engine with the most visitors. You will need to sign up for an account and register for their Webmaster Tools before you can submit your site.
Yahoo.com
Another site that is essential to be in is Yahoo! Yahoo.com is close on the heels of Google and has a lot of ways to drive traffic to your website if you can get listed. The following link will take you to Yahoo’s URL submission page.
Bing.com
Over the past couple of years Microsoft has grown their search engine Bing to be a greater force within the search engine industry and they are certainly one to put on the list. You will however need to register for their Webmaster Tools and sign in before you can register with them
Submit your website to bing.com
dmoz Open Directory Project
This is a web directory of Internet resources, which if you get listed in will most probably see you getting picked up and listed in Google, Yahoo and Bing without even having to submit to them. The following link will take you to a page that tells you how to submit your website to dmoz, please make sure you read it and submit your site exactly as it is specified because getting into this one is important.