After you get your first website build and hosted, the next think you will need is visitors and most people look at Google and other search engines as their main goal. While not the fastest or easiest route, one way to go about getting ranking is through free search engine submission.

First of all, it is important to distinguish between search engine optimization and submission. Often, people will use these terms almost interchangeably, but they are distinct and different approaches to gaining better placement in search engine rankings.

Free search engine submission is simply the method that gets initial attention for your site so that it will be indexed by the search engines, basically letting them know your site exists. This is often simply known as search engine registration.

However, getting indexed, or listed, with a search engine is not the same as getting a high ranking for a particular term, or keyword, that relates to the theme of your site. But, it does mean that the search engines at least know that your website exists, and that is the first step in the right direction.

The next step after taking care of your free submission, is to tackle the optimization, which is also referred to simply as SEO. Of course, you can pay for the submission if you feel the need to, but really, for this step in the process, the free submissions services should be more than sufficient to get the attention of the top search engines.

Search engine optimization is the process of manipulating the content of your web site pages so that they can earn a high rank for the particular keywords that you are targeting.

Two of the primary criteria that the search engines look for when analyzing a page to determine how it will be shown in the results listings are linking, both inbound and outbound, and the quality and pertinence of the content to the targeted keywords.

You will also see terms such as search engine positioning, placement, and ranking used quite often in relation to website promotional activities, and all the these terms essentially mean the same thing: how well a site is doing as far as the ranking position for the desired keyword term or phrase.

For most webmasters, their primary goal is to optimize their site so that it will be shown in the top ten listings for their target search term, putting them on the first page in most top search engines.

You will also frequently hear terms such as search engine promotion and placement, and these refer to the general process of site marketing with includes activities such as site submission, page optimization, and paid listing management.

Free search engine submission should be considered just the bare minimum steps for webmasters to take so that the site can start drawing in visitors, converting them to customers and bringing in some revenue for all their trouble.

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