Search Engine Submission
The first thing that any web developer needs to do is submit their website to search engines. The first thing that an average developer will do is submit their site to millions of different search engines, believing that the more search engines they are submitted to the more traffic they will receive. This is definitely an a huge misconception and here’s why…

Here is a breakdown of the market share of the top 10 search engines (courtesy of wikipedia)

As you can see, of everybody searching on the Internet, 46.47% search on Google.com, 17.16% search on yahoo, and 12.87% search on MSN (well just forget all the foreign search engines such as Baidu which is a chinese search engine). Out of all the searching done in the Internet, 76.5% all come from yahoo!, Google, and MSN.com, or as I like to call them “The Big 3″. Now every other search engine besides those “Big 3″ either have a very small amount of searches (aol, ask.com etc.) or is powered by the “Big 3″. If you’ll notice, on many of the smaller search engines you see, they all are “powered by google” or “powered bay YAHOO!” etc, so in reality, you don’t need to submit yourself to hundreds of search engines, only 3.
Often times, search engines will just pick up your page automatically and start to index it, especially if you have other websites linking to yours, but it is still a good idea to submit your URL to them anyway.

Google: www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Submitting a sitemap

Submitting a sitemap is very important, because the way search engines work is they “crawl” around the Internet indexing pages they find by going from link to link. What a sitemap is, is a map of all of the pages on your website, and by submitting this to a search engine it gives them all of your pages to ensure you get your entire site mapped.

Google:
To submit a sitemap to google first you need to create your sitemap. The simplest and best (and free) program I have found so far to do this is the Auditmypc sitemap Generator. You use their program to create an XML file which you will then save to your computer, and add it to the root directory of your site (example: save the file as sitemap and add it to your root directory so your sitemap’s URL would be www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.)

Once you have your sitemap file, go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools ,setup an account and log in.
After you are logged in, enter the URL to your homepage into the box and click “add site”, and then click on the link on the box to the left that says “add sitemap”, chose “add general we sitemap” from the dropdown menu, then type in the url to your sitemap in the box, and then wait for your page to begin being indexed. This happens on a routine basis and wont happen immediately. Check back here every day or so to check on the progress.

YAHOO!:
Submitting with yahoo, is in my opinion less effective, but it still does’nt hurt. To submit to yahoo!
1) First create a text file with a list of all the urls to the pages on your site and save the text file as urllist.txt.
2) Save this file into your websites root directory and then go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (you will need a yahoo account to get this far so make one if you don’t have one).
3) Lastly submit the URL to that file

Note: I am unsure, but I believe the URL to your google sitmeap may also work instead having to make urllist.txt, but it doesnt hurt to submit both.