Another of our question from Matt Cutts Grabbag series has been created in a video and uploaded today to its official channel. Enjoy!!

Hi all, this is a special post today, although late but I wanted to do this since a long time. In December 2009 again Matt Cutts (Head of Google's Webspam Team) invited questions for Grab Bag, as usual we submitted our question which was also the 3rd most liked question in the community. For the benefit of our users we are posting the video created by Matt here.

Inormally do not recommend buying any software, because search engines provide very good information/tools for keyword research.

Here is what I do:
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Just finished writing an article, on what to expect out of a SEO Career. Read the entire article at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Career Option?

Please note that today's post is really meant for existing SEO's and Business Owners.

Keyword Research? Lots of companies are offering tools for a fixed subscription cost and they provide you with a list of related keywords for your primary term. My question is, do you really need to subscribe to such a service so that you can get hold of the right terms. Search engines particularly Google have been doing a fairly good job in providing the webmasters with keyword research tools mostly free, so that they can get the right terms.

After a long time, I am finally writing this. I have been wanting to do this for a long time. I have written this in the past as well, What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? According to me SEO is not just being on the top most pages of the search engines, it is a lot more than that. According to me whenever I take up an assignment for SEO, I always try to ask the client what do they want to achieve out of this exercise. This is very important, most of the times the client itself is not clear of what they want or they are looking at very vague targets. If you ask me, what is one of the most common mistakes made by the website owners, I will answer building their website and then calling the SEO guy, whereas it should be the other way round.

Any business wanting to survive in business (note: I am saying business and not business on the Internet) should seriously consider Search Engine Optimization and spend more than 50% (that is what I believe) of their marketing budget to it. This might sound strange at this stage, but let me tell you if you get your act right on day one, trust me it will give you great results in the long one. Plus the other common mistake made by the companies is that they still do not give importance to their websites, whereas it is one of their most important real estate. If you are a business owner and are seriously thinking marketing your website, get a genuine SEO Services Expert Company, who not only just provides you SEO Services, but also advises you on how to increase your overall presence.

As a part of being a loyal Matt Cutts Reader, I asked him a question wondering whether sometime in the future will Google Webmaster Central would include a feature, saying that hey your website is not according to the webmaster guidelines beware?. See his answer in the following video:

One of the very important and easiest way to tell the search engines about all the pages of your website is to create and submit a sitemap. Other than being the easiest it is also one of the very important for a few reasons:

• It lets you tell search engines about all the pages on your website
• If the pages on your site are poorly linked you can use a sitemap

Sitemaps can be created in many formats but one should always follow a format supported by Sitemaps.org. What I do for simplicity is create an XML format for Google,Live.com and Ask.com and TXT for Yahoo. There are many free and paid software that can be used to create Sitemaps or if you know all the URL's of your website you can create one yourself manually. I am personally using Gsitecrawler.com and auditmypc.com currently.

This is the continuation to my previous post. After you have submitted your website manually to the search engines, all you have to do is keep on waiting for them to arrive and crawl your website. But we as humans are really impatient, there is much more that we can do rather than just waiting.

You can start working on your incoming links, now that does not mean that you go an start looking for every free directory on this planet and submit your website to them. Try to rationalize, think logically and act smartly. One thing that you need to find out is that where your potential customers hang out on the web, like is it social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, etc... or if it is a business oriented website than is it Business Communities, Press Releases. If your business is in the IT industry than according to me one thing that really works is Usenet groups, a lot of activities happens on really popular groups, it is really worth checking them out.

Let us assume the fact that your website is fairly new and your developers have just finished uploading it. There is a very little chance of search engines to know your website and immediately crawl, although this is not something which is not possible. Before I tell you how to manually submit your website to search engines, I want to tell you that your website should really have quality content so that it ranks properly. Always design your websites for your customers keeping the search engines in mind rather than designing for search engines keeping the customer in mind.

Here are the links on how to submit your website to 4 different search engines: