What are some of the larger software packages out there that optimize (doorway page etc) and submit your site to the search engines, and have any of you used these and have you had much luck with them??

I can't say any I've used have been helpful.

However, we've been around a while, with a lot of built-up presence in the s/e's -- so it can be difficult to tell if a submitter tool actually did much.

If I remember rightly, a good place to prowl for this sort of software -- including some half-decent freebies -- was over at http://www.WebAttack.com

My e-commerce company uses SubmitWolf, available from local company Trellian (http://www.trellian.net). It does a very good job of submitting your site to the 'lesser known' engines, and it has succeeded reasonably well in submitting our sites to the more common engines like Altavista and DMoz and getting some of our clients pretty good rankings. However, it has been inconsistent at times with some of our client sites and you still have to submit to Yahoo! and LookSmart by hand.

One tip however : if you're going to use the 'acknowledge submission' tip, create a free Hotmail account for that - you'll get thousands upon thousands of acknowledgment e-mails back.

We use trafficbuilder 4.0, but have had 5 months of hell with them, the boxed version that we bought in the store was defective, we asked their tech support via phone what was up, and they said that they knew there were problems with it. I asked why it made it to the store shelves, they said it was a difference and lack of communication between departments of programmers and marketing.

Well, they said they'd put me on their beta test team (funny, the program was already on the store shelves, how could it still be beta version), anyway, we waited patiently after being told that it would be 2 weeks before we get the next version, 2 weeks turned into 5 months and aproximately 50 emails. Well the end result was that they sent us a new cd with the newer version, we installed it, and it works great, we've never gotten Yahoo to list us via the trafficbuilder software but most of the others have.

So, if you can get your hands on Trafficbuilder 4.0, the version that actually functions, it's worth the money to purchase the beginner model, I dont see much use in the webmaster or pro version whatever they call their 499.00 model.. Just go to the local softwarehouse, and purchase Intelliquis's Web Works.

Their website is at http://www.intelliquis.com

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