In the early of 1996, I have developed a homepage, which I dedicated to a kind of music I really like. The homepage is hosted on Geocities(home of the longest URLs’ homepage repository) free hosting service at that time. It is almost impossible for anybody to visit my site by accident because of the long URL. I tried to let everybody know the existence of my homepage, send emails, sign guestbooks, join forums, but I forgot( or I did not know that we have to submit our URL to) the search engines. The homepage got very few visitors, until I gave up and just let it be. And now, for your information, the homepage still exist, but I have already forgot the password. I do not know how many visitors it got per day now because the web counter service is also missing.

However, submit your web site’s URL to the search engine is not enough to start getting visitor. It will take about two month for your site to be indexed in the search engine. You also need other plan or strategy to promote your web site. This article is only about getting indexed in the search engine. Here is some links to add your web site’s URL to the Internet search engine or public directory.

Dmoz.org, The Open Directory Project
To be indexed in this directory is the priority. It is the key to be indexed and to get a high rank in other search engines. There are thousands of search engines available in the Internet today. Many of them such as Google, Altavista, Yahoo and Netscape get the listing from dmoz.org.

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free. There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to the directory, and/or to use the directory’s data.

Here is the link to submit your web site’s URL to dmoz.org : http://dmoz.org/add.html

Google.com
I personally think, Google is the best search engine. Every day I use google.com to search any information from the Internet. You could find the information from website, newsgroup, images and directory in one search. Although other search engine have the same feature, but Google’s website is so simple. Another advantage is Google also feed about 80 other search engines. 60% of my previous website’s visitors came from Google.
Here is the link to submit your web site’s URL to Google : http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo.com – Altavista.com, AllTheWeb.com
The second search engine I like most is Yahoo. Actually, Yahoo is a directory based search engine. Altavista and AllTheweb’s search index also powered by Yahoo. So, if your web site is indexed in Yahoo, your web site will also got indexed in Altavista, AllTheWeb and other search engines feed by Yahoo.
Here is the link to submit your web site’s URL to Yahoo (require registration) :
http://rds.yahoo.com/search/submit/free/*-http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Submission to over 100,000, 500,000 search engines and directories.
My advice is to not using them. It might be useless, unless you want your email box to get spammed. If your site is indexed by big search engines, most probably those smaller search engine will get your URL as well.

In the beginning of this article, I had mentioned about the music homepage I built. The homepage now is indexed in every search engine available although I never submit it to any search engine. The key is to be linked by other sites. I may write an article about this later.