Submission means filling out a form on a search engine’s site to invite them to add your site to their index. What many people don’t realize is that this is unnecessary. Engines find what’s on the web by following links. As long as there’s a link to your site from any site that’s already in the search engines, the engines will find your site. If you don’t have any incoming links you’re not going to rank well anyway.

Once your site is listed in an engine you’re in for good (unless you get kicked out for trying to fool them, as covered below under Black Hat SEO). There’s never any reason to resubmit your site once it’s already in. Resubmission is a waste of time. The overwhelming majority of search traffic comes from the top five or so search engines. Some companies will offer to submit your site to “thousands” of search engines. This is a waste of money. If your site is linked to from anywhere, you’ll get in all the search engines that matter, automatically, for free.

Here are some typical things that can cause an engine to fail to find your pages.

1. Links are done in Javascript. Many engines don’t follow links done in Javascript, such as those found in drop-down menus. If you have Javascript links, make certain you also have text links somewhere on the page as well. It doesn’t hurt to have Javascript links as long as you also have plain links on the page.

2. Links are done in Flash. Many engines can’t follow links in Flash. If you have Flash links, make certain you also have text links somewhere on the page as well.

3. Orphaned pages. If you forget to link to a certain page from at least one other page, that page page is said to be orphaned. An engine can’t find it because it can’t follow a link to it. Make sure every page on your site is linked to from at least one other page.

4. Dynamic pages. Search engines can generally follow dynamic URLs (those with a question mark) as long as the have only one or two parameters. Three parameters — hard to say. Four or more parameters is probably pushing it. But even if the engines can follow dynamic URLs, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those pages will rank well. Two noted experts stated flatly in 2003 that pages with dynamic urls rank worse than those without. It’s unclear whether that’s true today, but many webmasters aren’t taking chances: They’re using the Mod Rewrite feature of the Apache web server software to turn dynamic urls into static ones. There are many threads on WebmasterWorld about how to do this. If you prefer not to turn your dynamic urls into static ones, you should at least put the most important parameters in your urls first. There’s some feeling that the engines may try the first two or three parameters and ignore the rest. For example, if your url was:

http://domain.com?language=Eng&user=4873&style=15&article=238

Then instead try:

http://domain.com?article=238&language=Eng&user=4873&style=15

5. Site is down. An engine can’t index a site if it’s down. Make certain you use a reliable webhost. (You can also use monitoring software or subscribe to an automated monitoring service to email, phone, or page you if your site goes down.) It’s unlikely that you’ll be removed from an engine just because your site was down once when they tried to visit, but if your site is down for several days that could spell bad news. An engine doesn’t want to list your site in the SERPs if visitors can’t actually get to it.

6. Images and Frames. Search engine spiders can follow image links and links in framesets just fine — depsite what you sometimes read on the net.

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