I’ve been doing this SEO stuff for a long time, long enough to remember search engines like snap, hotbot, lycos, etc.  Things have greatly evolved when it comes to search since the good ole days, one evolution in particular is how we tell search engines about your new content or brand new web site. Back in the day, we had a whole list of places (URL’s) to submit a clients web site to. We would go to snap, hotbot, lycos, google, etc. and hand submit the URL, sometimes choosing categories, demographics, etc.  Fast forward about 12 years:

I laugh every time I see an alleged SEO company selling the dream of submitting your web site to thousands of directories and search engines (especially when they still have some of the non-existent search engines in the list.) The truth and reality is this: we do still submit web sites, sort of.  We build an XML sitemap and make certain that this sitemap is available for the search engines to digest.  For example, Yahoo has an area where we submit our clients XML sitemaps to, Google has the same. It is up to us to keep that XML sitemap fresh and updated. The search engines crawl this sitemap and are aware of any new links / pages we have created, thus helping us to get those pages indexed quickly and efficiently.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring in terms of search, but it is critical to stay on top of what the search engines are up to and how they are crawling / and / or indexing web sites.