What is Search Engine Submission and should it be part of Search Engine Optimization?

A plethora of websites offer Search Engine Submission (SES) services, however these are not needed. As long as you have another site linking to your web pages, you will get indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SES can cost a lot of money, often with the promise of getting indexed by thousands of search engines. Why bother? About 90-95% of all searches performed on the World Wide Web are via Google, Yahoo and MSN. I just would not worry about the rest.

If you do feel the need to submit your pages, you could try the search engines own URL submission pages such as this one at Google and the good thing is, they are free.

You could even try spending money on an SEO service to make sure that your web pages are optimized for the search engines, if performed correctly, will also generate links for you which will mean automatic inclusion in the indexes of search engines. All SEO's should build up links to your website as part of what is known as off site optimization or link building.