I have been working really hard on my site, so my question is this: When should I start submitting my site to search engines, etc.? My site isn't finished completely yet, but enough that I was wondering about this.

I do need to go through and make sure everything on my end is optimized first (key words, tags, links, etc.), but was wondering if I can submit to search engines and all that fun stuff NOW. I'm getting impatient!

Thanks!

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Jules, SunRise Virtual Solutions - WordPress Customization & XHTML/CSS Web Sites

IMHO: Submitting to search engines is really unnecessary these days. Submit it to your social bookmarking sites (especially delicious, digg or mixx) ask your friends to vote on it and you don't need to go through all the time of submitting to search engines. Post a link to twitter while your at it.
I think is should be mostly complete before you start driving traffic though.

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Dawn Pigoni
Social Media Virtual Assistant

You can sign up for Google Analytics. Make sure you have a "Sitemap" on your website and it will pick up every page from the sitemap.

Andrea~

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Action Jackson Virtual Assistant|

The social bookmarking sites are good, this is true. But when your site is ready to launch, I think you should still submit it to all of the main search engines. And if you submit it to the DMOZ, you write your own descriptions and make sure they say what you want them to say. . .etc. There is more control this way. When you feel your site is complete besides a little maintenance, you should go for it! Once search engines get your site indexed, they systematically crawl them for updates. (as long as your robots.txt files allow it) I suggest using Google and bing webmaster tools. They are very useful!

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Amber Whitener
Virtual IT Assistants

Now I am only a student, but I think it's said that going ahead and submitting your site as soon as you have your domain name makes sense. This is because it takes a few weeks for Google to check you out, and it takes a pretty long time to climb up in the search pages. So you want to start as early as possible. Of course, you want to complete the website content in due order; but since the search engines crawl regularly, they'll pick up your updates.
Anyone else also understand it this way?

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Mary H. Ruth/Virtual Writing & Communications
http://www.writingVA.com

Hi Jules,

I did a little homework at 6:00 am this morning. Google has your site already.

The three big search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN send out crawlers to detect content. They also feed the other search engines. So if you want to submit, submit to these three for sure. You can continually submit after you make a change (or changes) but I would limit this to 1x per month max. The engines will find you whether you submit or not, but if you want reassurance, submit!

I checked your site at google by typing in site:sunrisevirtualsolutions.c om in the google toolbar. It returned a search results screen showing 34 pages cached for your site. You can do the same at Yahoo and MSN to check there. (Don't type www - do it as above on each).

You must submit to the Open Directory project (DMOZ) as Tess mentions. It's "the" directory and the only way to get in is to submit. I need to do this too!

You've done a great job on your site!

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Jen Scoggins
www.virtual-jen.com

Correction. I have a typo in the search address. There is no space in "com", which you probably figured out, but thought I should correct since I stated to "do it as above". The correct entry is site:sunrisevirtualsolutions.c om .

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Jen Scoggins
www.virtual-jen.com

Originally Posted by Virtual-Jen

Correction. I have a typo in the search address. There is no space in "com", which you probably figured out, but thought I should correct since I stated to "do it as above". The correct entry is site:sunrisevirtualsolutions.c om .

LOL - Jen, it still did it in this post. I think it's just a forum thing because it's happened to me, too. Oh, and I had done the site: command, so did see that it was being picked it up. I even did the link: command just for the fun of it! Of course, no inbound links yet.

Thank you so much to everybody that replied! I have my "short" list of who I want to submit to (Google, Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ directory, and I'll ping Ask with my sitemap), so I'll do that probably tomorrow (I need to get my sitemap on my site and robots.txt). I'm going to see if I can find the lesser known submission sites that are in my niches and submit to those, too, using Alexa to hunt 'em down.

Thanks y'all!

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Jules, SunRise Virtual Solutions - WordPress Customization & XHTML/CSS Web Sites