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There are hundreds and thousands of search engines in the internet, and the size still keeps growing up. Among these, only a very small part of them can bring more or less traffic to your websites. For those unpopular engines, it's a waste of time to manually submit your site into it one by one, just do it by automatic submission softwares.

In this article, first I will list those top, major and very popular search engines with a short and brief introduction, and you are strongly recommended to manually submit to them one by one. Second I will list those engines which are less popular than the first ones in a table, and for these engines, if you have time, manually submit your site, if not, turn to softwares. Some of the popular search engines like MSN, doesn't accept online submission, because they are using data from other engines or directories. Whatever the case, you need to make sure your website can be listed in these popular search engines.

For each location or country, there shall have one or two famous search engines in that region with the local language, for example, Baidu is much more popular in China than Google. For those non English search engines, I'm very sorry I can't list them in this article.

Note: I'm talking about the popularity of a search engine, not the rank or sequence of engines you shall submit to. And for the PageRank and Alexa Rank values showed, they are data of September 8th, 2006, and may be changed in future.

No.1 Google

Website: http://www.google.com;  PageRank: 10;  Alex Rank: 3;  Submit URL: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Nobody will suspect that Google currently is the number one search engine in the world. Its powerful spiders all over the world keep crawling the internet and can give users the best search result. Get indexed and ranked high in google search result will bring huge traffic to your site. And the submission process is also easy, just go to the above URL and fill in the form, monitor the visitors to your site and you will find that Googlebot visits you everyday.

No.2 Yahoo

Website: http://www.yahoo.com;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 1;  Submit URL: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
Yahoo was the first search engine of the world, and first it was accepted by people due to its search function. Though overrun by google because of its more powerful search engine, Yahoo is the number one in traffic. Submitting to yahoo directory and get indexed can only be done manually and takes about 1-2 weeks, and it's a payment service. But because of its number one traffic in the world, get listed in Yahoo and found by visitors in Yahoo worth the money and time.

No.3 Open Directory

Website: http://www.dmoz.org;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 192;  Submit URL: submit to the category your business belongs to
Open directory is not a search engine, and actually few people will go there searching for information. Though PageRank is 9 which means its link popularity is high, it only ranks 192 in traffic. But don't blame me for putting No.3 here, because almost all the major search engines accept its database. Get listed in Open Directory means that you can be found in those major search engines, like MSN, Altavista, etc. The submission process is easy but takes a long time, luckily 4 weeks, if not, a long time can't be estimated. Many experts put it as the second one to be submitted to (Yahoo directory is the first), but because it's time consuming and laborious, I suggest you submit to those easy and fast ones first.

No.4 MSN

Website: http://www.msn.com;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 2;  Submit URL: http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
MSN's search service is powered by Looksmart result. It was ever reported that Microsoft is going to develop their own spider, whether it's done or not I don't know. However because of its traffic rank of 2 and PageRank of 9, can be found in MSN definitely will bring your remarkable quantity of visitors. There is no submission URL in this website, and you have to get listed in other directories and engines to be found by them.

No.5 Live

Website: http://www.live.com;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 10;  Submit URL: http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
Another website of Microsoft. The same as MSN, it's important because of its huge traffic (rank 10 in traffic), PageRank of 9, and Windows MSN Messenger.To be found by Live, your site shall be indexed by other directories and engines.

No.6 Altavista

Website: http://www.altavista.com;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 181;  Submit URL: http://www.altavista.com/addurl/default
Altavista was previous "Google" of its day before 2000, and since then, its customers kept declining until acquired by Yahoo. Despite its status today, Altavista does have a loyal group of users that love its service, so you are still suggested to manually submit to its database in case it will bring a few visitors. Submitting to Altavista is almost the same as Google, while the only difference is that maybe you need to wait a few days to see its robot visiting your site.

No.7 AOL

Website: http://www.aol.com;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 36;  Submit URL: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
AOL provides another two urls for the searching service, http://aolsearch.aol.com/ (internal), http://search.aol.com/ (external).It provides users with editorial listings that come Google crawler-based index (Google acquired AOL early this year), so the same search on Google and AOL will come up with very similar matches. The "internal" version of AOL Search provides links to content only available within the AOL online service. In this way, you can search AOL and the entire web at the same time. The "external" version lacks these links. To be listed by AOL, you need to be indexed by Google.

No.8 Alltheweb

Website: http://www.alltheweb.com;  PageRank: 9;  Alex Rank: 1038;  Submit URL: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php.
Same as Altavista, Alltheweb is also a property of Yahoo now. Its focus is on web search, but news, pictures, video/audio are also provided. From its Alex Traffic Rank, we can see that AlltheWeb doesn't have a big share in the searching market. But as a member of Yahoo Search Alliance, it will bring visitors from other members of the alliance to your site. Alltheweb provides free submission and, Bid on keyword submission (payment service).

No.9 Baidu

Website: http://www.baidu.com;  PageRank: 7;  Alex Rank: 4;  Submit URL: http://www.baidu.com/about/service.
Baidu is a Chinese language search engines, and conquers Google in the searching market in China region. I'm putting it here because its high daily traffic (more than 1 billions visitors per day, Alex Traffic Rank 4). So if your business has anything related with China and her people, or your business is targeted at Chinese, get listed by Baidu, it will bring even more visitors than Google to your site due to the big population of China. It is also the first who brings forward the bid on keyword service, which is the more you bid, the higher your rank. If possible, go and bid for that service, it is worthy the money.

No.10 Looksmart - If you have spare money

Website: http://www.looksmart.com;  PageRank: 7;  Alex Rank: 5123;  Submit URL: pay-per-click directory.
Looksmart itself is not a search engine, and even is not a first choice directory. This can be seen from its PageRank (7) and Alex Traffic Rank (5123), which is unfitting with its indexing fee and click through price. However, if you have the money, I will still put it here because of MSN (see the brief introduction for MSN). Get accepted by Looksmart, maybe MSN will boost your traffic a little bit, but make sure the traffic worth the money.