Why spend days manually submitting your website to the search engines, when you can have it done automatically by a submission application?

On the web you will see advertisements similar to the following: Submit your site to 1500 engines in 5 minutes for $19.99
That's a real time and money saver, right?

As a website designer, I can tell you this is a waste of time. You are wondering, "why should I spend days doing this or hire someone to do it for me, when the auto submittals are free and fast?" The answer is because you won't get indexed properaly if at all, with automatic submittal. Let me explain how submission truly works.

Engines hate auto-submittals. They get literally millions of attempted submissions from auto-submiters each day and they go to great lengths to stop these tools, by requiring passwords and fill-in details, before they will accept the submission.

Therefore for the worthy and major engines, auto-submission is useless. Also, after using a few of these handy dandy "do it yourself tools", you will have basically submitted the same site to the major engines repeatedly, which can and will get you banned from them entirely, because your site will be considered a spammer.

On the other hand, this is what happens when you submit manually:

You enable people to find you.
By doing it manually, you can choose the category it's listed under. You do not want to be lumped into the general directory or worse the infamous misc. category, as the link has less value.

Targeted traffic.
Doing a shotgun blast of submissions is poor marketing. You want to be in the engines and directories that will bring you targeted traffic. Each site requires completely different marketing. Which means you must tailor who you submit to, according to the viewer you want to reach. Most auto-submits don't give you those options.

Keywords and descriptions.
Having good descriptions/keywords in the Meta tags of your site isn't enough because these have been much abused and used to spam the engines with fraudulent keywords and descriptions. So key engines tend to ignore them. Manual submission is the only way to get the descriptions and keywords you need. Submit manually, as most engines and directories will let you set up your own title, keywords, and descriptions. You can also vary those keywords/ descriptions as a marketing tool, to see which bring you the most traffic.

Control.
Submitting manually gives you control over where your site is listed. Often with the auto-submitters, you may never have even heard of some of the engines and have no idea what they promote, or even what country they are in, you could be planting your site somewhere you don't want to be associated with such as an adult material site, and that could be counter productive to your objective, unless you happen to BE an Adult site. In other words, be careful.

In conclusion, do spend the time and do the research you need to submit your site well, or hire a competent person to do it for you. This is an on-going project, as engines come and go and you must continuously submit to new engines and placements. To succeed and gain visibility, you must stay on top of the ebb and flow of the engines. Otherwise, your hard work would have been done all for nothing and someone else will take your rank in the engine.

More soon
Esta