Hello all. I was interested in everybodies strageties for submitting sites to search engines. Services that do it for you for a good deal would be a useful post as well. Thanks in advance.
I don't recommend submitting at all. 1) Create an xml sitemap, register with Google, Yahoo, & MSN, verify your ownership, and provide the location of your sitemap to them. 2) Create some backlinks using social media sites, other topically related sites, and even forum posts with your link in the signature. If you don't have duplicate content you will get indexed pronto.
I definitely recommend submitting. When you submit your site to directories you get backlinks from them, and most of the time the directories have good PR ranging upto PR 7 sometimes. I have one proxy that I submitted to tons of topsites and noticed that all its traffic was from various topsites. Submit, it cant harm you.
I thought the OP was referring to submitting to search engines not directories. Even so, there are not many directories out there that can do you a lot of good anymore, especially with Google. If you plan to submit to a bazillion directories I would certainly look to see if the page is indexed and cached in Google otherwise you are wasting your time (with google anyway). Also, a cache date that is really old turns me off too. I think toolbar PageRank for many directories is not a good way to identify them as decent or not. Just my 2cents.
Oh your right, my mistake. In that case I agree with your intitial post, submitting to search engines is no big deal, because people only use Google , Yahoo, or MSN at most (even things lke dogpile refer to only these and some others). Submit good info to the big ones, the small ones will pick you up later.
http://www.socialmarker.com/ that is a good website to submit to lots of directories pretty fast. It's a little bit time consuming but i think it's worth it.
What is the best practice for doing the submission, is using Google Webmaster Tools one of the better ways? Thank you, this was very helpful.
Don't submit your websites to search engines directly. Google has a 2 month waiting list. To get indexed really fast, post on do-follow blogs, post on forums like DP and submit your sites to directories.
As many other have already said, there's no need to submit your site to the search engines. They will soon find your site from a follow link. Your time is better spent adding good quality content to your site.