SEO Urban Legend #2: Submitting to the Search Engines is Muy Importante

One of our clients recently received an email from a gentleman representing a certain SEO company (a company which, btw, is currently involved in a class action lawsuit for not delivering on their promises) who proudly claimed that they would submit his website to 8500 search engines! What I first wanted, of course, was to ask this guy to give our client a list of these 8500 search engines (or better, have him recite them from memory:-). As any good SEO knows, while a few of the search engines that matter might accept submissions, gone are the days when submissions mattered. Today, links matter...this is how the search engines will find the pages of your website. Set-up a site map, make sure that you don't have any dangling pages, and then go get some links!
BTW, I think I'm going to start yet another category of posts to eventually group together, "SEO Red Flag#". And the first red flag? SEO companies that offer to submit your website to thousands of search engines. Really. They should be ashamed of themselves.
I probably shouldn't mention it (lest my gentle readers consider me unkind), but not only was his SEO knowledge way off, his spelling and grammar were remarkably bad as well! Couldn't he have at least tried a little harder? Argh.