Once you have developed your website and ready to submit to the search engines. First thing that you should do is to optimize the website for the search engines. Optimizing means making it easy for the search engine robots to easily detect particular theme or phrase on your page. Say your website sells "Website optimization Books" and you want your website to be found when this particular phrase is searched. Search engine robots will automatically look up indexed sites with this particular phrase in the title, description, keyword, body section and display them sorted by relevance and page rank. Page rankings are developed over time based on your sites performance. Site optimization, content trustworthy, and incoming links from high quality websites will increase the site ranking on the search engines.
Follow the guidelines bellow to make sure the website is optimized well and to increase the search engine ranking;

• Develop a meta tag with title, description, and title. You can use our free Meta Tag Creator to generate a meta tag
• Keep your website title, description, and heading short and descriptive. Make very relevance to the page content
• Use quality and unique keywords that are relevant to the page content
• Avoid repeating same words over and over again unnecessarily
• Avoid pop up windows, auto redirects and invisible links
• Avoid duplicate titles, keywords, or descriptions on multiple pages on your website
• Bonus: use hard code html to develop the website instead of using html generators

Now your website is fully developed and optimized and is ready to be submitted to the search engines and web site directories. Major search engines such as google, yahoo, and msn have paying and free listing. Buying commercial listing will grantee immediate listing to the search engine while the free listing takes longer and does not grantee the listing at all. Generally the best way to get your website listed is to find quality high ranking websites linking to your site.

Submit a website to yahoo:
Yahoo accepts none-profit or informational websites to it's free none-commercial listing categories. Yahoo may reject a free listing inquiry for commercial websites unless the website contains none-commercial content. Yahoo crawlers will find any website indexed by google or other major search engines even if the site does not exist yahoo directory. Yahoo also has PPC (Pay Per Click) service which display your website on yahoo's front page for specific keyword or phrase. Click here to submit your website to human edited yahoo directory. You can also Sign up yahoo sponsored ads and get a $25 credit.

Submit a website to google:
Similar to yahoo, google has free listing and CPC (Cost Per Click) service. You can submit the website to google's free listing. Free listing inquiry could take weeks to be listed on google and is not grantee the site will be listed. If you signup the google's PPC service known as google Adword, You can bid a specific phrase and your site will be displayed google's first page for that keyword if you are among high bidders. This will cost you one time activation fee plus the running bid for the searched phrase when clicked.

Submit a website to MSN Live:
Similar to yahoo and google, msn has free listing and PPC (Pay Per Click) service. If you signup the Microsoft PPC service known as MSN adCenter, You can bid a specific phrase and your site will be displayed first page for that keyword if you are among the high bidders. Click here to use MSN Live for free.

Submit a website to other major search engines:
Most major search engines have both free and paying listing how ever some search engines do not have a direct listing whether it's free or paying. They will automatically crawl the website based on incoming links.

Free tools to submit a website:
There are free online tools or websites that will allow to submit the website to participating search engines. The most popular web submission sites are AddMe, submit express, and FreeWebSubmission. These websites submit the site to the search engines such as; ExactSeek, SearchSight, ScrubTheWeb, EntireWeb, Link Centre, Homerweb, WorldSiteIndex, Exalead, WebDirectory, MavicaNet and many others for free.