One of the best ways to get the most out of your advertising and marketing campaign is using basic SEO techniques, and by submitting your site to the search engines.

No amount of press releases, newspaper ads, banner ads, email or newsletter advertising will achieve the same results.

That's not to say that they aren't effective and that you shouldn't use them but studies have shown that search engine traffic can be much more beneficial.

The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines. These are scams and you will get NO benefit from doing this.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right keywords, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content.

Do not submit websites that are incomplete as this will harm your rankings.

While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent - including the name and contact information of your business.

There are thousands of new websites being picked up every day by the search engines, so simply submitting to a search engine does not guarantee that your site will be immediately listed or ranked highly. It may take quite sometime before your site is reviewed by human editors.

One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes it easier for the spiders (web robots) to crawl your entire site. Search engines like Google have been known not to consider submissions without site maps.

There are actually thousands of search engines and directories, but here is a list of the most popular search engines and directories that you can submit your site to:

Google
Yahoo
MSN
Whatuseek
ExactSeek
Scrubtheweb
AOL Search
HotBot
Search.com
Metacrawler
Dogpile
Lycos
LookSmart

Now at the start we talked about hiring a service that will submit your site for you, but there is also software available that you can use to submit your site to multiple search engine's at the same time.

If you decide you want to do your submissions yourself, then using a good piece of software can make your job much easier. Here is a quick list of some of the popular software for you to check out:

SEO Elite
http://www.seoelite.com

Internet Business Promoter
http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/

WebPosition Gold
http://www.webposition.com/

Web CEO
http://www.webceo.com/

Of course there are many more available and you can find one that's perfect for you by doing a quick search in your favorite search engine.

Make sure you look for your next lesson where we will be talking about the importance of your referrer logs.

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