We highly recommend manually submitting your website pages to the search engines.  That said, the search engines give no guarantee of ranking your page because you have manually submitted it.  It is a tool that we use to let the search engines know that we have new information to share.We suggest manual submission of your site’s pages to Google, Yahoo! and MSN because they have made it apparent that it is what they prefer.  The search engines have emplemented manual submission as best practice to protect themselves from extreme levels of spam.   It is important to submit your site’s pages to all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) because even though they have less traffic than Google, they have millions of users.   When you submit a URL or domain name to the search engines, it could take anywhere from two to four weeks to get indexed.  Sometimes your page will not get indexed after you submit it, if that occurs, wait four weeks and then resubmit the page again.

If you are unhappy with your web page’s ranking results, take a look at what your competition is doing.  Make sure you are following the basic rules of search engine optimization.  Make changes to the page and resubmit it to the search engines.  You can submit your pages a maximum of two time per month until you are listed in the major search engines’ results.

Google
Google’s URL submit is very quick and easy.  Just go to Google’s web page for URL submitting, type in your URL, type in the message that ensures Google you are an individual not a software robot and click “add URL.”  
 
Yahoo!
At Yahoo! you can submit your URLs for free, just like at Google.  Go to Yahoo’s URL submit page, type in your URL and click “submit feed.  You can also submit your website’s site map.  Type in your domain name, http://<your domain name>/sitemapxml.aspx and click “submit feed”.

At Smart Solutions, we add all of our clients’ sitemaps to the auto-discovery directive, robots.txt.  This ensures that all of the search engines automatically know about your sitemap.  It does not hurt to manually submit your sitemaps, for the search engines that allow it. 

Yahoo! Directory has a paid submission process.  The cost is $299 annually for each directory listing that you submit (the cost is more for sites with adult content or services).   We recommend  submitting your site the Yahoo! Directory if you are a commercial site.  Yahoo! guarantees that your submission will be reviewed within seven business days.  If your listing is accepted, the annually fee will reoccur in subsequent years.

MSN
MSN allows you to submit your URL, just like Google and Yahoo!.  Go to MSN’s URL submit page, type in the URL of your homepage (this is different than Google and Yahoo!).  MSNBot will follow the links from your homepage to all of the pages on your site.  MSN also requires you to identify yourself as a person, not an automated program, by typing the characters that you see in the picture.
http://search.msn.co.za/docs/submit.aspx

Ask
Ask presently does not allow you to submit URLs.  However, they do allow you to submit your sitemap.  You can submit your sitemap by typing into your browser bar: 

http://submission.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://<your domain name>/sitemap.xml.aspx

http://www.smartz.com

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