You have probably seen them many times. SEO companies that claim to submit your web pages to thousands of search engines. These search engine submission services always claim that this is what you must do to drive serious traffic to your site. There are even sites that claim to submit your site to over 10,000 search engines and directories!!

These are usually lots of Free For All links pages. Don't submit to them - you will not get any traffic. Instead, you will get lots of spam and the truth is that the top search engines, the ones that you need to be listed in, will probably penalize you for using them.

The following search engine optimization services and programs should be avoided at all costs. Do not take the word of those supplying these services about the benefits of their use or acceptance by search engines simply at their face value. They spend a great deal of time propagating all the myths about why their services or programs are needed. In most cases, the myths do much more harm than good and will only get your site into trouble with the search engine!

Automated Search Engine Submission Programs: These programs promised to submit your site to thousands of search engines and directories. The fact is that they mostly submit to Free for All link pages and directories which nobody is using. Such programs sound impressive, promise great results, and usually offered at very low price. But they rarely get your any real results on the top search engines.

Doorway or Gateway Pages: This is a very common technique still used by many so called "professional" SEO companies. Although it used to work fairly effective in the past, most search engines are not giving much, if any, significance to such pages.

Cloaking and IP Delivery: This is a more advanced technique than doorway pages and can be quite complex to set up. Although most companies that used such technique claimed to be delivering good results, the fact is most search engines do regard this as spam and it can result in your site being  banned and blacklisted!

Automated search engine submission programs:

Keep this in mind, the top 10 search engines provide over 95% of all traffic. Of these, two are directories and must be hand submitted by someone who knows how to optimize and submit the listing for best results. You can never get your site listed on these directories using automated program.

Most of these submission programs come in three basic flavors:
Submission of pages at regular intervals - This is a major myth. The search engines seldom drop a page from their listing, unless it is banned! Repeated submission of an existing page on the search engines never get you better results. In fact, some engines even give more preference to older page.
 
Automated service that submit to hundreds or even thousands of search engines in a single click. Many look like the submission was accepted based on a simple response from the search engines. But there is no way you could verify this unless you are prepared to check through all the engines and directories!
 
Standalone submission programs residing on your computer. In a lot of cases these programs submissions are just going to result in a ton of spam email. Listings that are refreshed regularly (needing re-submission), provide little if any real traffic.

Doorway or Gateway Pages:

Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. They are designed solely to gain high rankings in search engines, that means it is created not only with the purpose of being "spidered", but also with the purpose of getting your website optimized focused on a few of your keywords.

These generated pages are probably not going to provide the first impressions of the site that you really need to make sales. Users looking for good information find these pages to be a waste of time and leave quickly.

Remember, getting traffic to the site is only half the battle, once on the site the user wants to easily find the info or product they searched for. First impressions play a big part in a user's decision to purchase.

Furthermore, if all of your pages have been providing valuable content and specifically designed to rank high in the search engines, you won't have any need for a doorway page. Your content and web design should stand on its own.

Therefore, focus on delivering content within your website. Work smart. Intelligently optimize your pages. And, most importantly, give the engines what they want - content-rich information pages - and they’ll likely give you what you want; top rankings for your selected keywords and phrases.

Cloaking and IP Delivery:

Cloaking and IP Delivery are a method of search engine optimization through technology. The program detects if the request is from a search engine and delivers the optimized page. This is accomplished by presenting different sets of content based on the IP address of a visitor. IP Delivery is a form of cloaking that is used to present content that has been specifically optimized to rank well at each search engine while still presenting the same content to each human visitor to the web site.

Page cloaking is one of the most controversial strategies in search engine optimization. Major search engines publicly state that they consider all cloaking to be spam. The reason that the search engines don't like page cloaking is that it prevents them from being able to spider the same page that their visitors are going to see. And if the search engines are prevented from doing so, they cannot be confident of delivering relevant results to their users. In the past, many people have created optimized pages for some highly popular keywords and then used page cloaking to take people to their real sites which had nothing to do with those keywords. If the search engines allowed this to happen, they would suffer because their users would abandon them and go to another search engine which produced more relevant results.

Ultimate, proper submission using a sound search engine optimization strategy are the keys to the search engine visibility door, they open the door, without them you are locked out.