Having your online presence listed with the major search engines might be compared to hanging up a sign outside a brick and mortar. Otherwise, no one would know that you are open for business. You have probably spent plenty of money to have an impressive website designed with your business in mind, fully loaded with all the latest e-commerce gadgets. You might be expecting that this internet venture will run on autopilot so that you can spend the rest of your life watching your bank account grow all by itself.

Although the picture painted above is very exciting and may very well come true for you, if your business is not listed with the major search engines, then the money you've spent on your website is blowing away in the wind while you're reading this article. It's simple. No sign, no customers, and no sales. No listings, no traffic, no sales.

Once your site becomes published or goes "live", a program called a "spider" "crawls" your website, examining the content and keywords. It then uses this information to decide how useful your site will be to internet viewers and will list your site in that order. The only problem is that this process can takes months to complete.

If you are in no hurry to start making money and have months to wait for your first customer, then this should be no problem for you. But like many folks, you may wish to start raking in revenue sooner than that. So it makes sense to look into the many ways of speeding up the process and avoiding the pitfalls associated with providers that offer submission to thousands of search engines.

For instance, pitfalls to avoid are the services that offer submission to 100 or more search engines. There is no point in engaging these services when Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, AOL, Ask, AltaVista, FAST, GigaBlast, Snap and LookSmart, cover over 99% of the global market which is more than adequate. So what makes more sense is to investigate how to submit to these top 10, and how to do this to get the best possible results.

Also with the ever evolving viral and social online marketing utilities, activities like article submissions, blogging, joining social networks and forums are great ways to speed up the process of moving your website up the rankings.

So, as you can see, some things never change. The value of hanging out a sign has always been critical to the success of any business and the same is true for your online presence.