Before you can even consider getting high rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN, you have to get indexed by the search engines. Heres how you do it for free.

Submitting?

Getting indexed is relatively easy, far more so than it used to be in the past. It is so easy that I am surprised I still get spam with submission offers.

Each of the big three search engines has a page where you can submit your site. The only one worth using is on MSN. Google and Yahoo take for every to get around to manual submissions, and there are far easier ways of getting into them. To find the MSN submission page, just search for "submit MSN."

Google

Google has really gone to great lengths to help you get indexed. If you are updating your site frequently, you should use the Google Sitemaps tool. The tool is free and gives Google a direct path for visiting your site on a regular basis. If you dont update that frequently, there is an even easier method for getting indexed.

For Google, the simplest method is to go to blogger.com and start a blog for your site. This blog platform is free. Just start writing about anything you wish. Within your ramblings, create links to pages on your sites. Since Google owns blogger.com, it will check the site every few days and follow the links to your site. Once on your site, Google is pretty good about indexing as many pages as possible.

Yahoo

The company tries to make money by charging you to be listed in the Yahoo directory, a companion section to its search engine. Depending on the type of site, this can run a couple hundred dollars a year with no guarantee of even being ranked! Many sites bypass this process by trading links with sites already in the Yahoo directory. Yahoo then follows said links to your site and indexes it. The beauty of this approach, of course, is no money comes out of your pocket.

Showing no shame, Yahoo has recently moved to turn its search engine into one giant pay-per-click engine. This new program is called "SiteMatch" and has met with a ton of controversy. Essentially, Yahoo wants you to pay to submit each url of your site, with prices ranging from $49 for the first one to $29 and $15 for subsequent sub-domains depending on the number of listings. As if that werent bad enough, Yahoo also is demanding that you pay for each hit these pages get from organic listings! The cost per click is either 30 or 15 cents depending on the type of site. In my humble opinion, this is a disgraceful move by Yahoo, and I refuse to be held up. You can make your own choice.

An alternative way to get listed in Yahoo is to turn your blog into a news feed. Youll need a free email account with Yahoo. Take the blog you created for Google and go to a free feed converter site like Feed Burner. Convert your blog into a news feed using the free service. This may sound complex, but it is exceedingly simple once you are on the site.

When the site kicks out your feed domain, add it to the My Yahoo page associated with your free Yahoo email account. Just go to the My Yahoo page and click the "add content" button in the top left. Enter your feed domain where indicated on the page that appears.

Next, go to a site like PingOMatic and ping the various blog listing sites out there. My Yahoo is one such site. Eventually, Yahoo will read the My Yahoo listings and follow the links in the blog to your site. This doesnt work as well as it used to, but it beats paying the SiteMatch fees.

MSN

MSN is very good about hunting down sites. If it hasnt found yours, just go to the submit site page mentioned in the "Submitting?" paragraph at the beginning of this article. Enter a url and MSN will crawl it within a week or two.

Getting indexed in Google and MSN is fairly easy if you follow these steps. As to Yahoo, youll have to evaluate whether you want to be part of the shenanigans.