Many companies after spending a substantial amount of money on the development of their websites assume that once the website is published on the Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore, do not take website promotion as seriously as the development part of it. Today, with millions of websites around, no matter how great your website is, if you don't promote it effectively, you will not get the visibility that your site deserves.

Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of the site to various search tools available on the Internet. There are two different types of search tools: search engines and directories. Search engines index their listings based on the information retrieved by their spiders that crawl through the Internet following links constantly looking for new websites. The directory listings are compiled by human editors from the URLs submitted to the directory. If your website is listed in the directories you can be sure that the spiders of different search engines sooner or later will index your site. That's why you should start submitting your website first from search directories.

Search Directories

Among all the search directories available on the Internet, Yahoo! and DMOZ are the most important ones.

Open Directory Project or DMOZ

DMOZ is the second largest human compiled search directory on the Internet after Yahoo! Open Directory Project is a huge web directory of Internet resources. All submission to the directory is evaluated by volunteer editors. There is no fee to be paid to get an inclusion in the directory. As a human edited directory it might take more than a month to get your site evaluated. Once you are listed in the DMOZ, within two weeks to two months your website will start appearing on other search engines. At present around 354 different search engines and portals use data from Open Directory Project. ODP makes its data available for others to reuse, and the various search engines do so. This is one of the main reasons why you must consider submitting your website to DMOZ.

Submitting your site to directories is a bit trickier then submitting to search engines. There is a long set of instructions here.

Yahoo! is one of the premier search engines. In addition to the search engine, Yahoo operates a web directory that many like to browse. Yahoo offers several ways to submit your site. You can pay a fee for guaranteed inclusion, or you can use the free submission form.

LookSmart Although it is the third largest directory on the Internet as a search portal LookSmart is not that popular. However, it provides directory listings to MSN search, About.com, Infospace, Inktomi and others. It is probably still the best way to get high ranking in MSN search. LookSmart is a fee based service. You pay US $49 submission fee for the site review by their editors and 15 Cents for each click through. Pay per click minimum monthly payment is US $15.

For noncommercial sites LookSmart has a partner directory named "Zeal". Zeal is a community directory for Internet surfers. To submit a site to Zeal you first have to become a member by passing a quiz test. The reason I am mentioning Zeal here is – you can actually submit noncommercial portion of your site to Zeal and receive an appearance in all of the places that LookSmart listings show up, without paying a pay-per-click fee.

Google No doubt that Google is the best search engine available on the Internet today. According to Google, they have indexed over 3.5 billion pages up to now! More Internet surfers are prone to use Google because it has great search enhancing functions, and you can always expect relevant and quality search results.

You can submit your link using Googles Add URL page located at google.com/submit_content.html. However, if you have links pointing towards your site on other websites, you can be sure that Google's spider, Googlebot will eventually come and index you site. Contrary to popular belief once your site is indexed, there is not need to resubmit your pages to Google, even if you updated the pages. If, although it is not necessary, you submit your website to Google, submit only the index page, it will find the rest of the pages using the links anyway.

The Google Sitemaps program offers a different way to submit your site. The webmaster creates an XML file describing their site content, and tells Google where that file is located. As new content is posted to the site, the XML file should be updated. This lets Google more easily know about new pages rather than having to re-read your entire site. You can also get reports about your content.

Altavista Once powerful, Altavista started to loose grounds to other search engines in a big way. Altavista is now part of Yahoo, and submission to Altavista's search results is done through Yahoo.

AllTheWeb Is now also part of Yahoo, and submission to AllTheWeb's search results is done through Yahoo.

Ask.COM is the successor to Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves had been popular once, but fell into disrepute. Ask.com recently rebranded themselves and completely revamped their site. They appear to be a very useful search engine now, and they are somewhat distinguished from Google in that their indexing algorithm is different. Where Google relies on link counts for popularity, Ask.Com uses an algorithm they call ExpertRank which is "based upon the clustering concept of subject-specific popularity".

They do not have a way to submit a site to their search engine. They completely rely on the crawlability of your site. If your site can be reached by crawling the web, it will be included in their index.

Ice Rocket is a blog-specific search engine. You submit your site here. Maybe you'll have better luck than I, their submission form didn't work for me.