Submitting your web site to a search engine is an effective way to bring targeted visitors to your web site. However, when it comes to web site submission, there are certain common mistakes that people tend to make repeatedly. By avoiding these mistakes, you can avoid a lot of grief and frustration in the end.

One of the most common mistakes is not checking that your web site is actually search engine friendly before you make your submission. There are many reasons why your website may not rank highly on a search engine, or why it might not even be included at all in the search engine's database. One thing that will make your site search engine friendly is to make sure that all of your pages have appropriate and descriptive titles. Also, you should have good copy that is written for people and not just for search engines. Another crucial thing is to make sure that the search engine can access all of the pages. For example, do not use Flash or JavaScript as the only way to navigate between the pages of the website.

Another common mistake is not having effective links to your site from other websites before submitting. Search engines make significant use of links between websites to evaluate the quality of the content of the site. A crucial component of any search engine optimization strategy is to obtain a wide range of links from strategically selected websites.

To obtain links from other web sties you should implement a system that would involve the following:

• Locating other relevant web sites and assessing their suitability to obtain links to your site.

• Contacting the owners of those sites and offer to exchange links with them. You should already have added the link to their web site first, and draw their attention to this.

• Follow up with the other sites after a couple of weeks if you have not heard back from the site owner.

• Drop their site from your links page if you do not hear back from them.

You also must make sure to choose the correct keywords to optimize your site with. If you initially choose the wrong keywords, all the time and effort that you spent to get a high search engine ranking will be wasted. Be careful not to choose keywords that no one searches for, or keywords that do not bring in targeted traffic to your site. Only after you have identified the particular keywords that are suitable for optimizing the pages on your site should you then start to fine-tune your web pages to rank highly using those keywords.

Remember no to put too many keywords in the Meta Keywords tag either. There are sites that have hundreds of keywords listed in the Meta Keywords tag, in the hope that by listing the keywords this way, they will get a high ranking for those keywords. However, that is not the way things work; the Meta Keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. To get a high ranking for any keywords, you actually need to put them in the body content of your site.

Some people make the mistake of creating pages that only contain graphics. This is a problem because search engines only understand text. They cannot decipher images, so if your site contains lots of graphics but little text, it is unlikely to get a very high ranking in the search engines. For improving your rankings, you need to replace the graphics with keyword rich text for the search engine spiders to determine what your site contains.

And finally, in order to save time, many people will use automatic submission software or services to submit their sites to the major search engines. Submitting your site manually to the search engines can take a lot of time, and automatic submission tools can certainly help you save some of that time. However, most of the search engines do not like automatic submission tools, and they may even ignore some of your pages if you use them. Being listed on the major search engines is just too important for your site to not spend the necessary time submitting it manually.