We've all seen these ads online where we can pay to get our website submitted to thousands of search engines. New web masters can easily think that this is a good deal. After all, who doesn't want free search engine traffic? Some of these services charge about $20. There are two reasons why it's not a good deal to use theses services.

First, there aren't that many search engines worth submitting to. Try this experiment: ask all of your friends to name as many search engines as they can think of. Add all the numbers together and how many did you come up with. In all likelihood the number is probably less than ten. Most people only use a small number of these thousands of search engines. The popular ones are Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

So just submit your site to the top ten search engines and you'll be fine. However, I wouldn't recommend even doing that much work. First of all, submitting your site to search engines doesn't necessarily give your site a good placement. You could be in the search engine, but have a couple of million sites above you in the results. This will get you about as close to zero visitors as you can get. So how do you get your site up in the rankings? This is the good news. The same way you get into the search engine. You have to get links. Search engines don't really need you to submit your website to them. If you get links from other sites pointing to your site, search engines will find your site. These links are call backlinks because they point back to your website.

Why do search engines rank sites with lots of backlinks higher? Search engines treat each link as a vote. If your website links to my website, it's as if your telling the search engine that my website has value. Now if many other websites do the same thing, then my website will move higher up on the search results. So in conclusion, there is no need to submit your website to the search engines, they will find you.