If you want to start getting natural search engine traffic, being discovered by the search engines is the very first step to get the ball rolling. There are several ways to get discovered by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing and the best part is that most of them are free. Let’s talk about the old ways of getting discovered and some of the new upcoming trends.

Submitting your website or page. Back in the day this was the most common way of getting discovered when he had a new website. There was actually a big line in front of you at all times of those who had already submitted their sites and were waiting for Google to crawl their sites before yours could have its turn. It was not uncommon to have to wait 2 to 3 weeks to be found by the major search engines.

Site map submission. Site map is a map that the search engines can follow once they get to your site to continually uncover new and fresh content. When you make changes to your site map, it is important that you submit the site map back to the search engines so that they can recommend you to consumers on the web. If you use WordPress, there is a great plug-in that will do this for you automatically called XML-sitemap.

RSS and Atom – Search engines want to find pages that worked really links to other pages within your site. So they started to crawl your RSS feeds or atom feeds. These are the content tools that are automatically updated when you some of the new story or at a new page on your blog. This is a great way to get discovered and a great way to update your readers.

Social Media – the explosion of social media sites has really changed the way and time frames of being discovered by search engines. But sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others are starting to get more and more attention from search engines like Google because they represent a growing trend in the Internet.

One-way links. If you go on to a highly traveled website, and comment on a blog post, leave your backlink to your site,search engines can find you this way as well. When I crawl that page again, they’re going to see your link and follow it to your site. This is a great way not only to get discovered but to build valuable backlinks to your site and improve your SEO.  Word to the wise, don’t spam your links.

Article marketing. If you use any websites like Ezinearticles.com or GoArticles.com, you can also get discovered and valuable quality backlinks from the site as well when you contribute original, well-written content. The same concept applies to article marketing as it does to one-way links, but this is just another way of getting your links out there.

Being discovered is the first step of getting your site to that place that you want it to be. Lots of readers a lot of traffic. If Google doesn’t know that you exist, they’re not going to send you any business. I’ve seen several websites over the years, actually more than several, that have been on the web for years and years, but still had not been indexed by Google. Needless to say, those sites are probably not getting very much traffic if any at all. Don’t be one of the sites, get indexed right away and start building for your future.