you guys, someone told me that when you have a site, you need to 'register' with google, yahoo, aol, etc. so that you could appear in their search engines... is this true? if so, how do you do it? thanks.
These days if you have enough links out there, the engines will usually find you but you can still submit manually. Here are the links for the big 3...
It's easy for me since I have a blog. Search engines love blogs and it didn't take me long to get picked up by search engines. I am with Blogger, which is owned by Google, so it was really easy to get listed in Google.
You can use a blog to get you site noticed by search engines.
Start on on the same topic or niche and when you post link to you site specific content on you site off of a keyword. This creates spider activity and your site will get noticed by SE when the follow the links.
Don't over do it. I've been told that a boat-load of links from one blog to one site works against you over time but i haven't had any direct experience with that part because I haven't been doing it that long.
Also don't put the same content on the blog that's on the site. That's the whole duplicate content issue.