If you have decided that you want your blog to be available to the whole world firstly you need to submit it to search engines so that they can find it.

However, do not think that this will bring you traffic straight away. It can take a long time to get indexed highly in certain search engines depending on a number of factors including how many other sites link to your blog. Another point to consider is that in the long run search engine traffic might not be the main portion of your traffic, however it is a good source of traffic and therefore must be utilised.

The three main search engines that you should submit to are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are of course many many other search engines, however they are unlikely to bring you much traffic, so for the moment I will not consider them. Other search engines also use the big threes data, for example by submitting to Yahoo, your site will also appear in AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

Submitting To Google

If you use blogger your blog and its sitemap will automatically be submitted to Google. You can check which pages of your blog are indexed in Google simply typing site:www.YOURBLOGSNAME.com into the search box. This trick also works for most other search engines.

If you use a different blog service to blogger you will have to submit your blog yourself. However, this is very simple. All you need to do is visit http://www.google.com/addurl/ and type in the URL of your blog.

You can also submit your sitemap by signing up for google webmasters http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This requires you to have a google account, which is free.

Submitting To Yahoo

To submit to Yahoo you need to have a yahoo email account, which is free to set up. You can then submit your site for free http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

You can also submit your sitemap using yahoo site explorer.

If you use blogger your blogs sitemap will be http://YOURBLOGSNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss.

Submitting To MSN

To submit your blog to msn simply visit http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx and add your blogs URL.

You can also submit your blogs sitemap or feed if you have a windows live (hotmail) email account http://webmaster.live.com/.

Note: If you are a WordPress.org user there is a brilliant plugin called Google XML Sitemaps that will do it all for you:-).

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