If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine.

No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

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, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

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

Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. 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.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors.

One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots.

Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services.

You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one: webposition.com

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:
http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission
http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Don’t use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines & Directory companies:

Search Engines

• Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
• Google, HotBot
• Excite/Webcrawler

Directories

• AOL Search Inktomi
• Lycos Open Directory
• MSN, Yahoo!
• LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible.

The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm
http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

• Article #1 -  How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers
• Article #2 -  Keyword Density
• Article #3 -  Must Have Features Your Web Site
• Article #4 -  Keyword Research Tools
• Article #5 -  Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
• Article #6 -  The Importance of Referrer Logs
• Article #7 -  The Importance of Search Engines
• Article #8 -  Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic
• Article #9 -  Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic
• Article #10 - Tools to Monitor Your Website
• Article #11 - Use Keywords In Page Titles
• Article #12 - Web Hosting Companies
• Article #13 - Web Hosting Services and Domain Names
• Article #14 - Website as Storefronts
• Article #15 - What Is Search Engine Optimization