I just launched my website and I want to get as much search engine traffic as possible. If I want my site to be found on Google, do I have to submit my site to Google?
You don't have to submit your site to Google in order to be found on the Google search results pages. Some search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN (LIVE Search) are crawler based search engines. What this means is that to be included in their index, your pages must be crawled by their automated crawler program that we often refer to as a spider or bot. Googlebot, is the name of the crawler mechanism that Google uses to crawl your pages. It also follows links on your pages, unless otherwise directed, to find other pages on your site or other sites.
If you have a just launched, brand new, website and Google finds a link to your website on a page of some other website, then your website pages will be added to the Google index. This doesn't require any submissions process of any kind at all, and is actually the preferred way for Google to find new page content.
However, if you want to be sure of being crawled, you can manually request that Google crawl your site.
Google encourages us to share our content in a variety of ways, including offering us ways to:
Yahoo and MSN have similar tools, allowing us to manually inform them of new content. However, for all crawler based search engines, they prefer to discover your site by following links from other sites.
Non crawler based search engines actually require that your site be submitted to them before they will visit your pages to determine your content.
Lastly, there are numerous directories on which you can freely list your website. Again, these require that you submit your site to them before they will be listed. They will not crawl your site in any way to determine content, you have to inform them of your content at the point of submission. The most influential directories on the web continue to be the DMOZ (Open Directory Project), and Yahoo Directory.